Committee
Graduate Students
Sinem Eylem Arslan
Co-chair
(she/her/hers)
Sinem Eylem Arslan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. She holds a B.A. in Sociology (Honours) with a specialization in Social Justice and Equity Studies from Brock University and an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto.
Her research interests include anti-racist and intersectional feminist approaches to gender, spirituality, meaning-making and community-making in sonic spiritual practices. She specifically investigates non-Western frame drums’ spiritual uses, profitability, and contribution to knowledge (re)production in women-only contemporary spiritual circles in North America.
Jordan R. Brown
Co-chair
(she/her/hers)
Jordan R. Brown (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology and Presidential Scholar at Harvard University, where she holds the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Fellowship. Originally from Virginia Beach, Virginia, she obtained her bachelor of arts (B.A.) degree in both music and statistics from The University of Virginia and her master’s in ethnomusicology (M.M.) from Florida State University. She is currently co-chair of Harvard’s Southern-Pian Society and a UNESCO Youth Ambassador for Peace and Intercultural Dialogue. Brown’s current research interests include Black underground politics, Black feminist theory and queer theory, Black alternative music, video game music, and genre studies, all specifically in the late 20th century.
In addition to her scholarly interests, Brown also composes musical arrangements, performs with her band “Jordan and the Boys,” releases original songs under her pseudonym J-Renee, and produces podcasts. She identifies as a performer-scholar and intends to continue bridging the two practices in her future work. For more information, visit jordanrbrown.com.
Carlo Aguilar González
(Elle/they/them/theirs)
Carlo Aguilar González is a Ph.D. Candidate in Music and Sound Studies at Cornell University. Originally from the Islas Canarias, Spain, they hold a bachelor's degree in viola performance from the Rafael Orozco Conservatory of Andalucía, and a bachelors degree in History and Sciences of Music. They obtain a masters in Spanish and Hispano-American Musicology at at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and a masters of arts from Cornell University.
Carlo’s work has evolved from an engagment with the canon of Western art music to a critical examination of its cultural and geographical hierarchies. Focusing on popular music, they seek to explore the relationships between gender, sexual dissidence, music, territory, and identity within the vibrant and sonic world of drag shows. Driven by a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, they employ queer theory, race critical theory, and cuir decolonial criticism to investigate how sound, voice, and embodiment become strategies of thriving queer existence across geographical and political borderlands.
Brian Veasna Sengdala
(he/they/theirs)
My name is Brian Veasna Sengdala and I'm a queer, Khmer and Lao American, disabled Ph.D. candidate in performance studies at Cornell University. With performance, sound, music, race, disability, land/mines, food, refugeehood, and queer of color futurities, I study how second-generation Khmer and Asian American artists imagine histories with traumatized archives through what I’m calling transgressive memory work. I did previous doctoral work in ethnomusicology at Rutgers, and hold a dual M.M. in American and public musicology and choral studies in sacred music and a B.M. in voice performance from Westminster Choir College.
I’m also co-organizer of a public project on the afterlives of refugee camps called The Bamboo City Archive which starts with our work on Khao I Dang, the refugee camp my mother’s family went through. I also serve on the research committee for the Cambodian Model Curriculum through the California Department of Education.
Renata Yazzie
(she/her/hers)
Renata Yazzie, Tó’aheedlíinii born for Kinyaa’áanii, is a Diné Ph.D student in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. She holds a Master of Music degree with dual concentrations in Musicology and Piano Performance and an undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the University of New Mexico.
Her current research interests are grounded in Diné perceptions, interactions and interpretations of sonic spaces across varied genres including classical music, Christian hymnody, Korean Pop, hip-hop, blues, and more. She is also involved with creating and implementing Indigenous-based music pedagogies for students K-12 and is the founder and director of the American Indian Musicians’ Scholarship which provides multi-faceted support for Native college students pursuing a degree in music. Overall, her academic and musical pursuits aim to improve music education in all realms for Indigenous students. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with family and friends, board games, and learning languages.
Alejandrina M. Medina
(she/her/ella)
Alejandrina M. Medina (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Integrative Studies program and graduate specialization in Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her dissertation, “Latina Loudness: Sensing Excess in las Américas” theorizes hemispheric racialized femininity after 1940. The project draws from transnational queer materialism, Latinx feminist aesthetics, and the sensorial to examine excess and its form in musical performance. Her writing can be found in Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture and forthcoming in Contemporary Music Review.
Lydia Bangura
(she/her/hers)
Lydia Bangura (she/her) is a singer and a doctoral candidate in music theory at the University of Michigan. She also holds a bachelor’s degree from Northern Arizona University and a master’s degree from Roosevelt University, both in vocal performance. Bangura was selected in 2022 as an associate artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where she had the honor of studying with mentor artist Dr. Philip Ewell. She is the founder and host of the music research podcast series, Her Music Academia, and serves as the student representative on the executive committee for Music Theory Midwest. Her research interests include the intersection of performance and analysis, theory pedagogy, Black feminism/womanism in Black women’s music, and the life and collaborative works of Florence Price. Also a lifelong music performer, Bangura has experience studying violin, viola, and voice. Her recent operatic roles include Pamina and Second Lady in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Alcina in Handel’s Alcina, Amore in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, and the solo soprano in Judith Weir’s one woman show, King Harald's Saga.
Hanisha Kulothparan
(she/her/hers)
Hanisha Kulothparan (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music. She holds a M.Mus. in Music Theory from Michigan State University, and a B.Mus. in Music History, Theory, and Critical Analysis from Wilfrid Laurier University.
Hanisha’s dissertation investigates form in post-millennial Tamil film songs, specifically looking at how theories of Carnatic music and Western popular music form a dialogue when studying this genre. Other research interests include studies in rhythm and meter as well as investigating intersections between music analysis and critical theories in rap and hip-hop. Hanisha has previously served as a member of the Eastman Theory Committee for Equity and Inclusion. She is currently a co-editor of Intégral: The Journal of Applied Musical Thought. Outside of theory, Hanisha enjoys jigsaw puzzles, watching Disney movies, and spending time with her family and friends.
Balakrishnan Raghavan
(he/him)
Balakrishnan Raghavan is an accomplished musician, researcher, and educator. He is a doctoral student in cross-cultural musicology at the University of California Santa Cruz. Bala's work focuses on oral traditions of music across the Indian subcontinent, with an emphasis on the politics of spirituality, sacred songs, South Asian performing traditions, mystical traditions, caste, gender, and sexuality. He is a STEM-trained computer science engineer as an undergraduate, and an Arts/Humanities/Social Science trained doctoral student. Bala trained for over twenty years in traditional vocal music, including a two-year-long immersive discipleship with South Indian Classical musician Dr.R.Vedavalli and fifteenth-century mystic poet-saint Kabir's philosophy and songs from Shri.Prahlad Tipaniya. With over ten years of interdisciplinary performance experience, he attempts to re-imagine the many ways of looking at traditional music from India, centering the marginalized experience at the intersection of song, immigration, race, gender, personal narrative, transnational experience, and performance.
Kimberley Watson
(she/her/hers)
Kimberley Watson (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology and Folklore at Indiana University, Bloomington. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) in Music from the University of Trinidad and Tobago, a Master of Music (M.M.) in Music Education from the University of Delaware, and a Master of Music (M.M.) in Ethnomusicology from Bowling Green State University. Her work explores Afro-spirituality and ancestrality within carnival, calypso, steelpan, and African-derived religious practices. Through this lens, she examines how African beliefs and practices within these cultural forms shape and reflect Trinbagonian epistemologies, asserting that these traditions permeate everyday life and defy separation from the mundane.
In addition to her research, Kimberley has experience teaching music to students with special needs and has compiled a resource book for teaching percussion and traditional Trinbagonian instruments to students with disabilities. An accomplished musician herself, Kimberley plays steelpan, clarinet, and percussion.
Graduate Student Committee Alumni
Laurie Lee
Alissandra (Lissa) Reed
Jeffrey C. Yelverton Jr.
Hyeonjin Park
Abigail Lindo
Anna B. Gatdula
Gerry Lopez
Affiliates
Ana Alonso Minutti
University of New Mexico
Ana Alonso Minutti (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor of Music, faculty affiliate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute, and research associate of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute at the University of New Mexico. She was born and raised in Puebla, Mexico, where she graduated summa cum laude from the Universidad de las Américas. She came to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Davis, where she obtained M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in musicology. Her work focuses on music traditions from Mexico, the U.S. Southwest, and Latin America, and her current scholarship engages with experimental expressions, Chicana feminisms, critical race theory, and decolonial methodologies.
Clifton Boyd*
New York University
Clifton Boyd (he/him) is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at New York University, where he will transition into his role as Assistant Professor of Music in 2024. He holds a Ph.D. in music theory from Yale University. His research explores themes of (racial) identity, politics, and social justice in 20th- and 21st-century American popular music. His current book project, Keep It Barbershop: Stylistic Preservation and Whiteness in the Barbershop Harmony Society, demonstrates how nostalgia-fueled efforts toward musical and cultural preservation can perpetuate racial injustice. Combining critical race studies and music theory, this work furnishes new understandings of whiteness, barbershop as a racialized musical practice, and vernacular music theory. His articles and essays appear or are forthcoming in Music Theory and Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, Theory and Practice, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as the edited collections The Oxford Handbook for Public Music Theory and Being Black In The Ivory: Truth-Telling About Racism In Higher Education. His research has been supported by fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He led the founding of Project Spectrum in 2017, and served as chair from 2017–19 and co-chair from 2021–22.
Nalini Ghuman
Mills College
Nalini Ghuman (she/her/hers) is Professor of Music at Mills College in Oakland, CA, where she teaches courses on Indian music, women and gender, opera, and seminars on music and conflict, migration, orientalism, nationalism, and postcolonialism. Professor Ghuman was educated at The Queen’s College, Oxford (BA, first-class hons.) King’s College, London (MMus, distinction), and the University of California at Berkeley (PhD in musicology and ethnomusicology). Her book, Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2014), was selected as the BBC Music Magazine’s ‘Book of the Month’. Recent essays include ‘Maud MacCarthy: The Musicking Body’ in The Music Road. Coherence and Diversity in Music from the Mediterranean to India, ed. Reinhard Strohm, (The British Academy Proceedings, Themed Volumes, 2019), and ‘Elgar’s Pageant of Empire, 1924: An imperial leitmotif’, in Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of display and the British Empire (Manchester University Press, 2015).
Nadia Chana
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Nadia Chana (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at University of Wisconsin–Madison. She grew up in Edmonton/Amiskwaciwâskahikan singing in choirs (and everywhere else), a context that directly shapes her work, however invisibly. Nadia’s research focuses on climate crisis and relations among Indigenous activists, settlers, and nonhuman actors in Northern Alberta and the California Bay Area. Fuelled by the urgency of climate crisis, she asks: what can healthy relationships between humans and the more-than-human world––plants, animals, water, land––look and feel like? And what role do practices like listening, walking, and even singing play in transforming these relationships?
More generally, Nadia is interested in listening, healing, voice (both audible and metaphoric), embodiment, alternative epistemologies/practice-based ways of knowing, critical race and Indigenous studies, experimental and collaborative ethnography, and Bay Area spirituality.
Ellie M. Hisama
University of Toronto
Professor Ellie Hisama was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Music beginning July 2021. Professor Hisama joined the University of Toronto from the Department of Music at Columbia University, where she served as the Vice-Chair of the Department of Music, Music Theory Area Chair, and as Chair of the Academic Review Committee at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Professor Hisama recently served as a humanities representative on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on Equity and Diversity at Columbia. In recognition of her service, Professor Hisama was named as a Provost Leadership Fellow at Columbia and as an inaugural recipient of the Provost’s Faculty Mentoring Award for her work mentoring tenure-track and mid-career faculty.
Her publications engage with the work of BIPOC artists, women musicians and composers, and considerations of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality across classical and popular music. In 2020-21 she is co-director with Zosha Di Castri of a symposium, podcast series, and concert titled Unsung Stories: Women at Columbia's Computer Music Center, and is convenor of a spring 2021 panel addressing anti-Asian racism. In Fall 2020 she directed Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston at 30: A Screening and Roundtable Celebrating Queer Harlem and co-directed with Michael Heller Feed the Fire: A Cyber Symposium in Honor of Geri Allen. She has given named lectures, keynote and plenary addresses internationally. An alumna of Phillips Exeter Academy, her classroom teaching is rooted in Exeter’s Harkness Method of collaborative learning.
Amanda Hsieh
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Amanda Hsieh is Research Assistant Professor of Historical Musicology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prior to their move to East Asia, they worked as Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto, where they also obtained their PhD (2020). Amanda's scholarship explores categories of gender and nation and their intertwined manifestations within opera of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. While their doctoral work locates opera in the Austro-German context, their next book-length project treats opera as a transnational – and even a global – phenomenon between Germany and Japan. They are the latest winner of the Jerome Roche Prize and their work has been supported by grants and fellowships from, among others, the DAAD, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, and the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. Their writings can be found in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (JRMA) and Music & Letters. They are the Reviews Editor of the JRMA and the RMA Research Chronicle.
Catrina Kim*
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Catrina Kim (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She earned her PhD in Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music in August 2020; she also holds an M.A. in Music Theory from Eastman and a B.A. in Piano Performance from the University of Houston. She has presented on early Romantic form and aesthetics as well as on issues in diversity, equity, and labor at regional and national music theory meetings; and her paper “Fragments and Frames in the Early Romantic Era” was a recipient of the Society for Music Theory’s inaugural Student Presentation Award (2019).
Catrina’s research gravitates toward the parameters that guide analysts to draw certain musical boundaries, the constitutive impact of these boundaries, and cases in which those lines are breached. This fall (2020), she looks forward to exploring these issues with UNCG students as she teaches a seminar on gender, race, and the musical canon.
Krystal Klingenberg
Smithsonian Institution
Dr. Krystal Klingenberg is a curator of music in the division of Culture and the Arts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Previously she held professorial positions at Swarthmore College and the University of Hartford. She received her PhD in May 2019 from the Music Department of Harvard University, with a secondary field in African and African American Studies. Her dissertation-turned-book project is on the creation and distribution of Ugandan popular music. It tackles questions of national identity in music, the status of copyright in Uganda today, and the growth of the Ugandan music industry. Klingenberg’s interests include global Black popular musics, African American music, digital media, and social justice. She is a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the African Studies Association and has held leadership positions in each. She is part of the curatorial team for Entertainment Nation and is the host of the museum’s Collected podcast on African American History.
Toru Momii*
Harvard University
Toru Momii (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University. His research focuses on interculturality in twenty-first century music, the racial and colonial politics of U.S./Canadian music theory, performance analysis, gagaku, and popular music in the United States and Japan. His article, "A Transformational Approach to Gesture in Shō Performance” was awarded the Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory, and his research has been recognized by the SMT-40 Dissertation Fellowship from the Society for Music Theory and the Junior Fellowship in Japan Studies from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He is a cofounder of the Engaged Music Theory Working Group, junior scholars committed to cultivating inclusive research, teaching, and service in music theory. Toru holds a Ph.D. in music theory from Columbia University, an M.A. in music theory from the Schulich School of Music of McGill University, and a B.A. in music and economics from Vassar College (Phi Beta Kappa). Previously, Toru has taught music theory and aural skills at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and Columbia University.
M. Myrta Leslie Santana
University of California San Diego
M. Myrta Leslie Santana is an ethnomusicologist and performer whose work examines the social and political significance of trans and queer performance in the Americas. Her book Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba, an ethnography of drag performance in contemporary Cuba, will be published by the University of Michigan Press in February 2025. Other writing appears or is forthcoming in Small Axe, Ethnomusicology, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Queer Nightlife (Michigan). Originally from Miami, Florida, Leslie Santana is currently Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego.
Matthew D. Morrison
New York University
Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is an Assistant Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University, an. M.A. in Musicology from The Catholic University of America, and B.A. in music from Morehouse College. Matthew is a 2018-2019 fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American research at Harvard University. He has been as a research fellow with the Modern Moves research project at King’s College, London, funded by the European Research Council Advanced Grant, and has held fellowships from the American Musicological Society, Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Center for Popular Music Study/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, The Catwalk Artists Residency, and the Tanglewood Music Center. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed music journal, Current Musicology, and his published work has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, and on Oxford University Press’s online music blog. His in-progress book project, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the U.S. considers the implications of positing sound and music as major components of identity formations, particularly the construction of race.