Participants
Can Aksoy
"Leisure Class Gangster: Exaggerated Conspicuous Consumption In Gangster Rap"
Can Aksoy is a PhD candidate from the department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His dissertation, tentatively titled "Extreme Businessmen: Corporate Life in the Contemporary Novel," analyzes satiric and exaggerated deployments of violent and psychotic businessmen in postmodern novels, illustrating this character's status as a widely referenced literary figuration of neoclassical money culture.
Salvador Barajas
"In the memory of Hope": a generative sound and movement installation
Salvador Barajas is a research fellow at the University of Richmond in American Studies. His interests include experimental sound, transactive cultural memory, digital archives, documentary, performance studies, globalization and decolonial thought. His current work looks at questions of place and belonging in the post-NAFTA border zones of the new American South.
danah bella
"In the memory of Hope": a generative sound and movement installation
danah bella danah bella is a dancer, choreographer and teacher.
She is the director of
d a n a h b e l l a danceworks, a modern dance company based in
Southwest Virginia. Her choreography has been performed in venues nationally and
internationally since 2002.
Thomas Burlin
"Music Piracy: Intentions, Ethics, and Crisis in the Music Industry"
Thomas Burlin is a Ph.D. (ABD) candidate in Music Education, Teaching Fellow and Supervisor of Teaching Assistants at the University of North Texas. He has presented at College Music Society national and regional conferences, at several state music education conferences, and has worked with contemporary a cappella and classroom guitar ensembles in many capacities. Thomas has degrees in choral conducting and music education and specializes in sociology, qualitative methods and alternative ensembles. His main areas of research include informal learning, democracy and education, and music as ritual and as an evolutionary tool.
Liz Canfield
"In the memory of Hope": a generative sound and movement installation
Liz Canfield is a sound artist, zine maker, teacher and organizer. She is on faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies and has presented work nationally and internationally. Liz is interested in questions of radical pedagogy, transformative technologies, decolonial queer epistemologies, visual culture and emancipatory ontologies of self and community.
Amanda Daly
"Words and War(riors): Music and the War on Terror"
Amanda Daly was the first person to graduate from Wheaton College (MA) with a degree in Ethnomusicology (2003). She received her MA from Brandeis in 2007 in Coexistence and Conflict and is in her second year of a doctoral program in ethnomusicology at Boston University. Her research interests include music and conflict on both ends of the spectrum, from war to peace. Specifically, she is interested in examining the topic of music torture — how music is used as a weapon and its socio-political, neuroscientific, physiological, and psychological meanings and effects. She also studies Cape Breton music and its diaspora, music of Boston/ New England, music therapy, medical ethnomusicology, music education, music and sports, particularly music and baseball, and music and neuroscience. She is an active vocal soloist, having performed thrice at Fenway Park for the Boston Red Sox. She has also been a member of the New England Conservatory Youth Chorale, Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston Pops Holiday Chorus, and Boston Pops Gospel Chorus. She plays violin, both classical and Cape Breton fiddle, and piano and speaks French, Spanish and German — and is adding more instruments and languages (particularly Gaelic, Russian, and Arabic) to her repertoire!
Julia Day
"Reimagining the 'African Success Story' through Ivorian Coupé-Décalé"
Julia Day is a doctoral student in Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington. She became interested in African popular music while living and working in Mali as a Peace Corps health educator. She is currently studying the relationship between popular music and socio-political crisis in Côte d'Ivoire as well as African migrant communities and music festivals in Quebec, Canada. In the past, Julia has researched and lectured on the innovative Malian ngoni virtuoso Bassekou Kouyaté, Bollywood film music and dance in Portland, OR, taiko in the Seattle Japanese American community, and American popular music.
Aurore Diehl
"Power Chords and the Crisis of Globalization: Neoliberalism, Youth Disenfranchisement, and Heavy Metal Music"
Aurore Diehl is an MA student in American Studies at the University of New Mexico and holds the Thomas L. Popejoy Fellowship at the Center for Southwest Research. Her research interests include popular music, gender, sexuality, and class, with a special focus on issues of gender in hard rock and heavy metal music.
Scott Dirkse
"Pedagogical Crises in the Music History Classroom"
Scott Dirkse is a PhD student in musicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara where his research focuses on music history pedagogy. He received his B.A. in piano performance and liberal studies from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, a secondary music teaching credential from Cal State University, Bakersfield, and a M.M. in piano pedagogy from the University of South Carolina. Scott is recognized as a Nationally Certified Teacher of Music (NCTM) by the Music Teachers National Association. He has presented at the national conferences for the College Music Society, the Music Teachers National Association, the National Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy, and Teaching Music History Day, and he has had his work published in Clavier Companion and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy.
Lillie Gordon
"Singing the Songs of the Egyptian Revolution"
Lillie Gordon, Ethnomusicology
University of California, Santa Barbara
Rebecca Hartness
"The Role of Music in Therapy to Restore Spoken Language for Sufferers of Broca's Aphasia"
Rebecca Hartness is currently a first-year graduate student at the University of Oregon, where she is obtaining her Master's degree in Communication Sciences and Disorders. Rebecca first received her B.A. in Communications-Visual Journalism and a minor in Music from California State University, Fullerton in 2008. As an aspiring speech-language pathologist and lifelong studier of music, Rebecca seeks to explore the interdisciplinary connectedness of both music and language, particularly as it can be applied in an evidence-based therapeutic setting.
Jade T. Hidle
"'Beats, Rhymes, and Rice': Re-remembering the Viet Nam War through Nam's Hip-Hop Album, Exhale"
Jade T. Hidle is currently a PhD student in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego. Her area of research is focused on how Vietnamese American cultural productions—from fiction, memoir, and film to hip-hop music, comics, and cookbooks—present marginalized bodies— especially veterans, transgendered individuals, prostitutes, mixed-race children—as a means by which the history of the Vietnam War, and Vietnamese American identities, can be rearticulated. Her work has been published in Ethnic Studies Review, Watermark, Spot Literary Magazine, and is in Beside the City of Angels: An Anthology of Long Beach Poetry.
Michael Joiner
"Rethinking Music in American Universities: A Historical Perspective"
Michael Joiner is a PhD Candidate in musicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His dissertation, "Courses in Culture: The Acceptance of Music in the Late-Nineteenth Century American University," explores the establishment of university music departments within the context of education reform movements. He has presented his work at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and other regional conferences and symposiums.
Melissa Kagen
"Music as Torture in Auschwitz and Guantanamo"
Melissa Kagen graduated from Brown University with a BA in Literary Arts, earned an MA in Humanities at the University of Chicago, and is now a first year PhD candidate in German Studies at Stanford. Her research is mainly focused on the construction of Jewish and German political identity in 19th century opera.
Sarah Moody
"The Japanese American Internment Expressed Through Hip-Hop: Mike Shinoda and 'Kenji'"
Sarah Moody is a native of San Diego, California, and received a B.A. in music from Point Loma Nazarene University. Sarah completed an M.A. in musicology at San Diego State University in December 2011. Her research focused on the cultural and musical identity of Japanese American popular music artist Mike Shinoda. Sarah plans to continue archival research at the University of Utah and will pursue a PhD in musicology in the near future.
Cynthia Morris
"Aloha 'Oe: Politics and the Prison Songs of Lili'uokalani"
Cynthia Morris is a native of Hilo, Hawaii. She is a Japanese-American whose family roots stretch back in the Hawaiian Islands for over a century. She attended California State University, Northridge where she was awarded her Bachelor of Arts in saxophone. After graduation, Ms. Morris made her way into the film industry where she spent the next several years working as part of the film editing crew on various motion pictures including Awakenings, The Last of the Mohicans, Spy Kids and the Matrix sequels. In 2010 Morris enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz to pursue an advanced degree in Ethnomusicology. Her research is focused on the protest music of Hawaii. She spends her weekends in Los Angeles with her husband Ed, playing traditional American music with friends and neighbors.
Chris Muniz
"Narcocorridos and the Nostalgia of Violence: Postmodern Resistance en la Frontera"
Chris Muniz is currently a College Doctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California, completing his second year in the Literature and Creative Writing PhD program. His research focuses on the literature, music and politics of globalization, with an emphasis on Third World urbanization, transnational border zones, and Native American and Chicano history/culture. Chris' interests also include issues of masculinity, race and ethnicity in post-Vietnam America as well as electronic music culture worldwide.
Tiffany Ng
"An Instrument of Urban Planning: The Lingering Power of the Dematerialized Belfry"
Tiffany Ng is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology with a Designated Emphasis in New Media at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is writing her dissertation with the guidance of Richard Taruskin and Steven Feld. Her research focuses on the politics of musical sound in public spaces, and its relationship to identity construction, asymmetrical power relations, economies of death and memorialization, schizophonia and disembodiment in live and playback performance, the historical performance practice movement, and the exploration of these issues through supernatural and violent narratives in film, opera, and literature. Her secondary interests include film music/sound and the digital baroque, new media opera stagings, and the relationship of recorded sound and visual culture. Tiffany earned an M.M. in Organ Performance & Literature from the Eastman School of Music, a licentiate in carillon performance from the Royal Carillon School "Jef Denyn" in Belgium, and a B.A. in English and Music at Yale University. An energetic proponent of new music, she has commissioned and premiered over a dozen acoustic and electroacoustic works for carillon and for organ, revived carillon pieces by Kaikhosru Sorabji and Robert Morris, and played over eighty concerts in eleven countries.
Steven Osuna
"Sounds from the Belly of the Beast: Rampart Police (Dis)order and the Psycho Realm Blues"
Steven Osuna is a 4th year graduate student in the Ph.D. program in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a B.A. and M.A. in Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. His research interest are the race and class history of Los Angeles with an emphasis on Latina/os, transnationalism, global political economy, Latin America, and comparative and relational Ethic Studies. He is currently working on developing a dissertation project that will explore the emergence of a transnational apparatus of social control of transnational labor and surplus populations between Central America, Mexico, and the U.S.
Ulrike Petersen
" 'Spiel', my Jazzband, spiel'!' Transatlantic Impulses in Inter-War Viennese Operetta"
Ulrike Petersen is a PhD candidate in Music History at the University of California, Berkeley. Originally from Hamburg (Germany), Ulrike first studied Music at Girton College, Cambridge (UK), where she completed a B.A. in Music (2005) and an M.Phil. in Musicology (2006). Her master's thesis examined the reception of Brahms in Germany during the Third Reich. Since her arrival at Berkeley, Ulrike's work has focused increasingly on early twentieth-century musical issues. Having spent 2010 in Vienna for archival research, she is currently working on a dissertation that explores aspects of operetta's political, social, and cultural impact in Vienna during each era of twentieth-century Austrian history. Each chapter provides a "thick description" of one significant operetta event in Vienna and aims to show the art form's important interactions with other genres and new media, as well as its uses as an influential political tool. Ulrike is currently a doctoral fellow of the Gerda Henkel foundation.
John Priestley
"In the memory of Hope": a generative sound and movement installation
John Priestley is a musician, teacher (VCU Kinetic Imaging), educational software developer (VCU School of Medicine), and doctoral candidate (VCU Media Art & Text). He is currently writing a dissertation on generative music.
Shari Sanders
"Let It Be: Countering Crisis in Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven"
Shari Sanders studies genocide, trauma and human rights abuses from literary and global geopolitical perspectives at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is interested in human, post-human and transhuman subjectivities as they are expressed and imagined in survivors' narratives and science-fiction.
Linda Shaver-Gleason
"Musicology and the Crisis of Interdisciplinarity"
Linda Shaver-Gleason is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In June 2009, Linda was awarded the Stanley Krebs prize in Musicology for her paper "German in Birth, English in Spirit: Mendelssohn's Posthumous Reception in Victorian England" as well as the Roger Chapman prize in Music Theory for "Seventh Chords and the Three-Dimensional Tonnetz." She has published two articles in the Journal of the American Viola Society. In January 2010, she helped organize the Music and the Written Word graduate conference at UCSB, where she also presented the paper "The Pleyel-Haydn 'Rivalry' of 1792: How a Conflict Concocted by London Newspapers became Music History." Throughout 2010, she participated in the Bach Project, a series of three performances in which internationally-renowned violist Helen Callus played all six Bach suites for solo cello; Linda provided the program notes for all three recitals and gave a public talk on the sixth suite as part of the final performance. She currently writes program notes for the UCSB Symphony Orchestra and the Santa Barbara Chamber Orchestra.
Daniela Smolov Levy
"Opera's Identity Crisis in America"
Daniela Smolov Levy is a fourth-year doctoral student in Musicology at Stanford. She is currently writing a dissertation on variation in opera's presentation format in twentieth-century America. She considers the significance of the recurring rhetoric of the "democratization" of opera, analyzing trends in popularizing strategies and their influence on opera's cultural reputation.
Martha Sprigge
"'The Narrative of a Belated Experience': Mourning the Allied Bombings in/through Rudolf Mauersberger's Dresdner Requiem"
Martha Sprigge is a PhD candidate in music history and theory at the University of Chicago. Originally from England, she graduated from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Music in history and theory with honors in 2006. Her dissertation explores mourning, commemoration and compositional practice in the German Democratic Republic. Martha received the 2011 Jan La Rue Travel Fund for research travel to Europe from the American Musicological Society, and currently serves as one of the graduate student members at large of the AMS Cold War and Music Study group. She holds a Dissertation Fellowship as part of the Sawyer Seminar "Around 1948: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Transformation," sponsored by the Andrew Mellon Foundation.
Theresa Steward
"Nostalgic Resistance: Popular Music During Iran's 2009 Green Movement"
Theresa Steward received Bachelor degrees in Architecture and Music from the University of Virginia in 2004. In 2008, she graduated with a Master of Music with Distinction in Musicology from the University of Edinburgh. She remains at the University of Edinburgh, working toward completing a Ph.D. in Musicology. Theresa's research focuses on popular music practice in post- revolutionary Iran, addressing issues of music censorship, the relationship between the Western media and the Iranian underground, music in the Diaspora, as well as music used in the events surrounding the recent 2009 Presidential election. In 2010, she received a graduate scholarship through the School of Art, Culture, and Environment at the University of Edinburgh. She has disseminated her research at conferences in the UK, including those through the Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum at City University, London; the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES); and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM- UK).
Tom Sykes
"Crisis in Cyberspace: Digital Technology and Anxiety in the Recording Industry"
Tom Sykes has been involved in music since childhood, and received a classical training on the violin. After becoming interested in jazz he went on to study at Leeds College of Music, being the only violinist on the jazz degree at the time. He is now program leader for the Foundation Degree in Popular music at Liverpool Community College, where he has been a lecturer since 1998. He holds a Master's degree in music (Open University) and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Salford, where his research is focused on the effect of digital technology on the dissemination and consumption of jazz in the United Kingdom. He regularly presents research papers at jazz and popular music conferences, has had several articles and book chapters published, and is a team member of Rhythm Changes, a major HERA-funded research project investigating jazz and cultural identity in Europe based at the University of Salford.
Kris Vavasour
"A Degustation Album: The Harbour Union with Seven Courses of P's"
Kris Vavasour gained her first degree, in Broadcasting Communications, in 1998. Since then, Kris has worked in a variety of roles in the media and events industries, ranging from Publicity Officer/Barmaid for a circus theatre company to Programme Director at a private media company. After more than a decade in the workforce, Kris swapped corporate life for academia — teaching part-time at the New Zealand Broadcasting School (her alma mater) while studying towards a BA(Hons) in Media & Communication at the University of Canterbury. Since commencing her university studies in late 2008, Kris has produced two radio documentaries, each exploring aspects of the local music scene. Both documentaries were broadcast on Radio New Zealand National, New Zealand's public broadcaster, as part of the award-winning documentary series, Spectrum. Kris is also in demand as a voice talent for commercials and telecommunications, and has run her own audio production company since 2000. Despite the devastation and disruption wrought by several thousand earthquakes over the last 18 months, Kris completed her BA(Hons) in 2011, gaining First Class Honours. Kris has been awarded a UC Master's scholarship and will be continuing her research on the role and place of music in a disaster community.
Josh Weinstein
"Septation: An Eye-Witness (Re)Composition of the September 11 Attacks"
Josh Weinstein is a jazz pianist, composer and sound engineer originally from New York. His album "Brooklyn Is Sinking" was included among npr.org's "Best CD's of 2006" (via WFUV), and his 2009 album "Love & Alcohol" was licensed to MTV for use on four shows. His work frequently incorporates found- and environmental sound—notably his 2011 composition "Septation," composed for the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks (which Weinstein was in). He is currently earning a PhD at the University of California, San Diego, where his research includes issues of 'liveness,' looping, and the various musical/perceptual/ cultural/evolutionary implications of the humble 'repeat.'
Brian Wright
"Sampling Sorrow: The Recontextualization of Popular Music in the Wake of Tragedy"
Brian Wright holds a bachelor's degree in Music History from UCLA and is currently a master's student at the University of Nevada, Reno. His primary focus is on American popular music of the 20th century, with an emphasis on early-90s Alternative Rock and the underground music scene of the 1980s.