Kimasi Browne is professor and director of Ethnomusicology and Music Research at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, California. He is an African American cultural specialist and an Intercultural Musicologist. He has conducted fieldwork on soul music, gospel music, British youth culture—Northern Soul, and Motown. He is a gospel choir director and has conducted and/or established gospel choirs in the United States, Ireland, and China.
Ya-Hui Cheng is an assistant professor of Music at Fort Valley State University in Fort Valley, Georgia. She holds a Ph.D. in Music Theory from Florida State University. At FVSU, Dr. Cheng teaches World Music Culture, Music Theory I, II, III and IV, Form and Analysis, and other core and upper level music courses. Her dissertation (2008), “The Harmonic Representation of the Feminine in Puccini” was the winner of the National Opera Association Dissertation Award for the 2006 – 2008 biennium. Her dissertation research has been published by VDM Verlag (2009) under the title, Puccini’s Women: Structuring the Role of the Feminine in Puccini’s Operas. In this book, she brings a unique perspective to the discussion of Puccini’s female characters as representing a trajectory in both the development of the composer’s style and his engagement with notions of the feminine and exoticism. Dr. Cheng has presented at regional and national conferences. Her article on Puccini’s “Tosca” is currently in press for The Opera Journal.
Maribeth Clark is a musicologist who received a PhD in music from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998, an MA in music literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1990, and a BM from Rice University in 1988. Most of her research has focused on French opera and ballet of the nineteenth century; however, she has begun work on representations of nature in music as well as music in circus performances and wild west shows during the early decades of the twentieth century in the US. She has taught at New College of Florida, a small, public, experimental liberal arts college in Sarasota since 1998, serving as chair of the Division of Humanities from 2004-2006 and associate provost from 2006-2010. She has published articles in Journal of Musicology, Musical Quarterly, and 19th-Century Music.
Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone earned a BA and MA in History from Central Missouri State University, a terminal MA in Museum Science from Texas Tech University, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas. She teaches Anthropology at the University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as Curator of Museum Collections. A scholar of music scenes and the anthropology of gender, Dr. Clifford-Napoleone is currently working on a an international study of queer fans of heavy metal, and serves on a committee planning a scholarly society for heavy metal studies. She lives in Missouri with her partner and their three dogs.
Kathleen Costello received a Ph.D. in Spanish with a concentration in Caribbean literature and culture from The University of Iowa in 2005. Since 2005 she has been an assistant professor of Modern Languages & Cultures at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY. Her research has focused on the Spanish Caribbean, and she has published primarily on the intersections between twentieth-century fiction and Caribbean popular music. Her current research examines popular music produced in Spain and the role of an Afro-Caribbean musical aesthetic in the construction of transnational Hispanic identity. She has travelled extensively in the Spanish-speaking world, living for extended periods of time in Santiago, Dominican Republic and Bogotá, Colombia.
Danielle Fosler-Lussier is assistant professor of Musicology at the Ohio State University School of Music. Her main research interest is music as a site of international political contact and exchange, including cultural diplomacy. She is the author of Music Divided: Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture (University of California Press, 2007), which explored the impact of international political pressures on musical preferences and values during the early cold war years (1948-56). Her next book project, now in progress, describes U.S. government sponsorship for musical performances abroad during the cold war and the international relationships created by these performances; she has been awarded an NEH Fellowship for this project in 2011-12. Fosler-Lussier’s research on music and cold war cultural politics has also been supported by fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Eisenhower Foundation, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.
Luis-Manuel Garcia is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. With the support of a James C. Hormel Dissertation Fellow in Lesbian and Gay Studies, he is currently completing his dissertation project entitled, “Can You Feel It, Too?: Affect and Intimacy at Electronic Dance Music Events,” which focuses on the “techno” scenes of Paris, Berlin, and Chicago. He is preparing a postdoctoral research project on “techno tourism,” focusing on trans-national mobility, class, and gentrification in Berlin’s dance music scenes. (personal blog here)
Peter J. García is associate professor at California State University Northridge. He completed his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001. His research specialization includes the U.S. Southwest Borderlands music-cultures including Native-American, Chicana/o, Euro-American, Afro-American, and “new mestizo” immigrant and indigenous communities. García’s teaching assignments include Understanding World Cultures Through Musics and Music from a Global Perspective. García’s publications engage decolonial theory, third world feminism, ritual studies, border consciousness (gnosis), multi-sited, auto, and anti -ethnography, the political economy of music. His original monograph Decolonizing Enchantment: Echoes of Nuevo Mexicano Popular Musics is “in press” with the University of New Mexico Press and forthcoming Fall 2011. Dr. García is also co-editing Performing the U.S. Latino Borderlands with Drs. Arturo Aldama and Chela Sandoval, which is forthcoming with Indiana University Press. This work theorizes third-world diasporic Indigenous, Afro-Cuban, Chicana/o, and Latina/o cultural performances including music, dance, street theater, and spoken word within the United States. Dr. Garcia is also co-editor of the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture (2004). García is currently faculty advisor and director of the CSUN Mexican (Latin/o) Music Ensemble- a student performing group that explores Latina/o musical styles, genres, and repertoire through original arrangements providing concerts, recitals and cultural performances for the local Latina/o and Chicana/o communities.
Jeremy Grimshaw is an assistant professor in the School of Music at Brigham Young University and the founding director of BYU’s Balinese ensemble, Gamelan Bintang Wahyu. His writing on contemporary American music has appeared in various scholarly publications, including The Musical Quarterly and American Music. He is the author of Draw a Straight Line and Follow It: The Music and Mysticism of La Monte Young, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in September 2011. He also authored a work of creative non-fiction, The Island of Bali Is Littered With Prayers.
Anthony Kwame Harrison is an associate professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Tech, where he teaches classes on popular music, black aesthetics, and cultural anthropology. Kwame holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. He is author of Hip Hop Underground: The Integrity and Ethics of Racial Identification (Temple University Press 2009) and a founding member of the Bay Area underground hip hop group Forest Fires Collective. Kwame is also an Associate Editor for the Journal of Popular Music Studies and in his spare time enjoys uphill jogging and downhill skiing.
Kathleen Higgins is professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Her the main areas of research are continental philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of music, and philosophy of emotion. She has written As Human as We Sound: The Limits and Potentials of Musical Universality (Chicago, forthcoming 2012), Comic Relief: Nietzsche’s Gay Science (Oxford, 2000), What Nietzsche Really Said (with Robert Solomon, 2000), A Passion for Wisdom (Oxford, 1997), A Short History of Philosophy (with Robert Solomon, Oxford, 1996), The Music of Our Lives (1991), and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (1987), which Choice named an outstanding academic book of 1988-1989. She has edited or co-edited several others on such topics as German Idealism, aesthetics, ethics, erotic love, and non-Western philosophy. She has been a Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University Philosophy Department and Canberra School of Music. She is a frequent Visiting Professor at the University of Auckland.
Max Katz is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the College of William and Mary. He received his Ph.D. in Music from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010. His current research concerns the North Indian city of Lucknow, focusing on an extended family of hereditary sarod and sitar players with long roots in the city. Katz’s broader research interests include Hindustani music, jazz music, Marxist theory, postcolonial theory, and popular culture. His research has been funded by Fulbright-Hays, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the American Musicological Society. Katz teaches courses in the Department of Music at the College of William and Mary that are cross-listed in Anthropology, American Studies, and Africana Studies, including Music of India, Worlds of Music, History of Jazz, Race and Music, and American Popular Music. His hobbies include playing jazz guitar, practicing taiji, and riding his motorcycle when the weather is nice.
Jennifer W. Kyker is assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Eastman School of Music and the University of Rochester. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where her dissertation explored music, morality, and politics in postcolonial Zimbabwe, through the songs of guitarist and vocalist Oliver Mtukudzi. Among her past and current research interests are music at the post-funerary rite of kurova guva, the role of women mbira musicians, and issues of musical migration and circulation, including Zimbabwean and Brazilian musical diasporas. She has received both Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays doctoral fellowships in support of her research, and was honored as a Dean’s Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to her work in ethnomusicology, Jennifer is the founder and director of the nonprofit organization Tariro, which works to educate and empower teenaged girls in Zimbabwean communities affected by HIV/AIDS (www.tariro.org).
Heather MacLachlan (Ph.D., Cornell, 2009) is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio. She teaches world music classes and directs the UD Javanese gamelan ensemble. She has published on a variety of topics (including American country music and music pedagogy). Her main research focus, to date, is music-making among Burmese populations, both inside Burma and in the diaspora. Her book, Burma’s Pop Music Industry: Creators, Distributors, Censors, is forthcoming from the University of Rochester Press. She recently began a new research project called “Singing Out!” that focuses on the LGBT choral movement in the United States.
James Makubuya was born in the region of Buganda in south central Uganda. He came to the United States in 1986 and earned a Masters degree in Western music and a PhD in ethnomusicology. He is currently an associate professor at Wabash College and makes frequent trips back to Uganda to do fieldwork in the musical traditions of East Africa. An accomplished instrumentalist, dancer and choreographer, he has studied with several master musicians from various East African musical traditions. Though the endongo is his primary musical instrument, he is also proficient on several others, including the adungu, akogo (thumb piano), ndingidi (tube fiddle), madinda (log xylophone), and in various East African dance drum styles. He has performed nationally and internationally with the New York-based African Troubadours, the Kayaga of Africa and the Kiyira Ensemble, and he has arranged traditional music for the Kronos Quartet, with which he performed in concert on the endongo. Before coming to the US he was the artistic director of CACEMCHO, Uganda’s 150-voice national choir, which he led in several successful international tours, including a concert and mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Makubuya performed on the soundtrack to the movie Mississippi Masala and several television movies and documentaries, and he has released three CDs, including The Uganda Tropical Beat I, Taata Wange and Watik, Watik: Music from Uganda.
Daniel Margolies is professor of History at Virginia Wesleyan College. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his B.A. from Hampshire College. His research examines globalization and empire, legal and musical spatiality, migrant transnationalism, and sustainability in conjunto, Appalachian, Cajun, and Mongolian music. He has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar/Lecturer at Sogang University in Korea, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Faculty Fellow at the American Center for Mongolian Studies in Ulaanbaatar. Professor Margolies’ new book is Spaces of Law in American Foreign Relations: Extradition and Extraterritoriality in the Borderlands and Beyond, 1877-1898 (University of Georgia Press, 2011).
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis (Ph.D. Columbia) is a music theorist who uses empirical methods to investigate questions about listener perception and experience. Her work, published in journals ranging from Music Theory Spectrum and Journal of Music Theory to Human Brain Mapping, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, and Review of General Psychology has investigated expectation, silence, repetition, and, most relevant to this institute, bimusicalism. She serves on both the Executive Board of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) and the Board of Directors of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC). Formerly a core faculty member in the music cognition program at Northwestern University, she is currently Associate Professor at the University of Arkansas.
Rebekah Moore is a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology with a minor in museum studies at Indiana University. In 2008 she moved to Bali, Indonesia to complete twenty-four months ethnographic research in preparation for her dissertation, “Indie Music in post-bomb Bali: Participant Practices, Scene Subjectivities.” In the dissertation, she explores music-related practices, such as rehearsals, performances, recording sessions, album production, promotion, and tours as the conduits by which core ideals of social and musical difference are created and shared. Rebekah received her Bachelor of Arts in music from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and Master of Arts in music with a concentration in ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland. Other research interests include indigenous rights and popular music, with a focus on Sámi music in Finland; the relationship between independent and national recording industries in Southeast Asia; the role of the Internet in shaping current music industry praxis; and popular music and issues of social justice. Today Rebekah continues to live in Bali while completing her dissertation, working as a freelance copywriter and within the music industry in music journalism, event organization, and band management.
Ali Coleen Neff is a writer, documentarian, musician and doctoral candidate in the UNC-Chapel Hill Communication Studies program with a graduate concentration in Cultural Studies (UNC) and graduate minors in Anthropology (UNC) and African and African American Studies (Duke University). Her current dissertation fieldwork is focused on sound, materiality and political imagination in emergent women’s musical movements in urban Senegal. Research areas include: popular music, material culture, anthropology of sound, critical ethnography, spatial materialism/Spinozist ontology, postcoloniality, African and African American cultural studies.
Sarah Quick currently teaches at Winthrop University (and other colleges in the Carolinas) as an adjunct professor. She holds a Ph.D. in Social-Cultural Anthropology (Indiana University 2009) with a minor in ethnomusicology. Her dissertation Performing Heritage: Métis Music, Dance and Identity in a Multicultural State considered Métis identity and public performances in relation to the heritage industry in Canada. This summer and the next she will revisit her doctoral research in order to video-document and reconstruct traditional Native fiddle dances. Recently, her research interests have expanded into thinking about how heritage is conceived through the slow and local food movements in the South. She regularly performs at the All-Local farmer’s market in Columbia, SC as a fiddler.
Jesus Ramos-Kittrell is currently assistant professor of music history at Southern Methodist University. Previously, he served as joint faculty of Ethnomusicology and Latin American studies at Tulane University and as a Visiting Scholar at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies of The University of Texas. His work focuses on religious culture in New Spain and popular music studies in Latin America, especially how sacred music in New Spain served as a mattress for the molding of social meanings and perceptions in relationship with the political and economic landscape of the early modern Hispanic world. Some of his other academic interests include Latin American colonial studies, music and early modern religious culture, issues of representation and identity in Latin American expressive culture, transnational cultural formations, and cultural citizenship. (on academia.edu)
Daniel Reed is associate professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, and affiliated faculty in African Studies, at Indiana University. He is the author of Dan Ge Performance: Masks and Music in Contemporary Côte d’Ivoire, co-winner of the Amaury Talbot Prize from the Royal Anthropological Institute of London. He is also co-author, with Gloria Gibson, of the CD-ROM Music and Culture of West Africa: The Straus Expedition, and author of numerous articles and museum catalog entries on Ivorian music and masks. His current research projects include a study of Ivorian immigrant performers in the U.S. in the context of globalization, and a study of transnationally organized HIV/AIDS edutainment campaigns in Francophone Africa.
K. Denea Stewart-Shaheed grew up in Texas with dreams of elsewhere. She received her doctorate in English Literature from the University of Houston and has taught at the college level for a number of years. She has attended both the Callaloo and Voices’ Writing Workshops. A lover of music, Ms. Stewart likes to push the boundaries between literary form and melody in her work. She believes the journey of the ancestors is never done and that to tell a story is to reclaim the past while simultaneously re-shaping the future. She is currently working on a novel entitled Honey.
Mina Yang is currently an assistant professor of musicology at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California. She has written extensively on music and politics, Asian American music, and music and postmodernism. Her first book, California Polyphony: Ethnic Voices, Musical Crossroads (University of Illinois Press, 2008), examines the intersection of racial politics and music in the Golden State. She is currently completing a manuscript on classical music in the postmodern age.