Committee
Graduate Students
Hyeonjin Park
(co-chair)
Hyeonjin Park (they/them/theirs) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Musicology at UCLA. They are interested in the formation of identity in game music and sound through the lens of monstrosity. They are also interested in player experience and examine how and why players hear things the way they do in video games. Hyeonjin's publications can be found or are forthcoming in the Journal of Sound and Music in Games, Music and the Moving Image, and The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound.
Sinem Eylem Arslan
(co-chair)
Sinem Eylem Arslan (she/her/hers) 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 Middle Eastern indigenous music(s), gender and spirituality, meaning-making and community-making in music circles. She specifically investigates frame drums’ spiritual uses, profitability, and contribution to knowledge (re)production in women-only contemporary spiritual circles in North America.
Gerry Lopez
Gerry Lopez (he/him/his) is a PhD student in Music Theory at the Ohio State University. Before his time at OSU, he earned an MM in Music Theory from Michigan State University. He also earned a BM and a MM in Flute Performance from the University of Redlands, and earned an AA in Music from Pasadena City College. Current research interests include music cognition, film music, and intersections of music and technology. Aside from his academic interests, he also enjoys the occasional Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, stargazing when the weather permits, and going down various YouTube rabbit holes.
Carlo Aguilar González
Carlo Aguilar González (Elle/they/them/theirs) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology at Cornell University. They are originally from the Canary Islands, Spain, a place that ties together the borders of an Atlantic identity. They completed their music studies with a bachelor's degree in viola performance in the Conservatory Rafael Orozco in Córdoba, Spain, and another one in History and Sciences of Music, followed by a Master's in Spanish and Hispano-American Musicology from the Complutense University in Madrid and a Master's of Arts at Cornell University. This itinerary of formation departed from an approach that invested in the canon of western art music to later focused on its criticism, questioning the high-low culture divisions and the relationships between music and gender and sexuality present in the current phenomena of Drag. Their work is inspired by social models that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, using queer theory, race critical theory, and decolonial criticism to question music, voice, and the possibilities of subject formation when entangled in geographical and political borderlands' history and heritage.
Renata Yazzie
Renata Yazzie (she/her/hers), 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.
Brian Veasna Sengdala
My name is Brian Veasna Sengdala (he/they pronouns) 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.
Hanisha Kulothparan
Hanisha Kulothparan (she/her) is a Tamil-Canadian who grew up in Toronto, Ontario. A first-generation university student, she is currently a Ph.D. student in music theory at the Eastman School of Music. She earned her B.Mus. in music history and theory from Wilfrid Laurier University and her M.Mus. in music theory from Michigan State University. Her current research interests include developing analytical methods for Tamil film music, as well as rhythm and meter in rap music and its intersections with critical theories. Hanisha has served as a member of the Eastman Theory Committee for Equity and Inclusion for the past two years. Outside of theory, Hanisha enjoys jigsaw puzzles, watching Disney movies, and visiting Toronto to see her parents, brother, and grandma.
Alejandrina M. Medina
Alejandrina M. Medina (she/her/ella) is an experimental writer and theorist of sound and performance, with a focus on contemporary Latinx and Trans of Color aesthetic production. Alejandrina's writing thinks through psychoanalysis, language, flesh, and the sensate to consider how dolls and Latinas are marked as excessive through circulations of power; drawing from Black feminist philosophy, disability studies, and ontological questions of scale, she is interested in finding ways of feeling loud and Latina that bypasses the quagmire of the human and the body it presupposes. Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Integrative Studies with a designated emphasis in Critical Gender Studies at the UC San Diego Department of Music, where she earned her M.A., and holds a B.Mus. in Performance Studies from Lawrence University. Alejandrina is a proud member of the San Diego-based organization Proyecto Trans Latina and is eternally grateful for the support she receives from her hermanas.
Jordan Brown
Jordan Brown (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology and Presidential Scholar at Harvard University. 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, Vice President of Solidarity of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ LGBTQ+ Association, and a committee member of Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Graduate Society. Jordan’s interests include researching African American popular music, rhythm and blues women of the 90s, Black alternative music, gender and sexuality, queer theory, video game music, and genre studies. In addition to her scholarly interests, Jordan also composes musical arrangements, regularly performs covers of music, releases original songs, and produces podcasts. She identifies as a performer-scholar and intends on continuing to bridge the two practices in her future work.
Abigail Lindo
Abigail Lindo (she/her) is a cultural theorist, creative, and PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Florida. She has presented nationally and internationally, with research interests including gendered behaviors, postcolonial imaginations, feminist futures, and community musicking in Caribbean, African American, and Azorean (Portuguese) sonic practices. Lindo’s dissertation research is focused on the religious and secular music festivals on São Miguel island, sustainability in musical ecotourism, and the lived realities of women and queer people in defining modern Portuguese sonic identity in the autonomous region of the Azores. Her publications include an article in Music and Politics in the Moment, another in the International Journal for Community Music (forthcoming), and a book chapter on African American female vocalists and intersectional cultural knowledge (forthcoming).
Balakrishnan Raghavan
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.
Graduate Student Committee Alumni
Laurie Lee
Alissandra (Lissa) Reed
Jeffrey C. Yelverton Jr.
Anna B. Gatdula
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. Leslie Santana*
University of California San Diego
M. Leslie Santana is an interdisciplinary writer, teacher, and performer from Miami, Florida. They are primarily interested in the relationship between performance and racial, sexual, and economic transformations in the Americas, and they are currently at work on an ethnography of gender performance in Cuba. Their writing appears in the edited collections Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford, 2019) and Queer Nightlife (Michigan, 2021). As a professor, Leslie Santana teaches classes on expressive culture in the Americas, the social and political contexts of musical art worlds, and critical and creative approaches to music scholarship. As a violinist, they have frequently performed and taught in various contexts related to the Sphinx Organization and the Tanglewood Music Center. They received a PhD in music from Harvard University in 2019 and a DMA in violin performance, with a graduate certificate in women’s studies, from the University of Michigan in 2015.
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.