Keynote Speaker
Diane Oliva is a musicologist who engages with history of science, sound studies, and Atlantic history to write transatlantic histories of music and listening in the eighteenth century.
Her doctoral dissertation, “Earthquakes in the Eighteenth-Century Musical Imagination,” examines the sonic repercussions of four earthquakes—Lima in 1746, Lisbon and Boston in 1755, and Santiago de Guatemala in 1773. These four earthquakes altered the landscape of musical practices in their respective epicenters in both subtle and profound ways, and she explores how music shaped and was shaped by experiences and knowledge of these events. Funded in part by a CLIR/Mellon Foundation Fellowship, she has conducted archival research for this project in Guatemala, Peru, Portugal, and Spain.
As a postdoctoral fellow at USC’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities, she was developing her dissertation into a book manuscript, while also beginning preliminary work on a second project tentatively titled “Sonic Mappings: The Nature of Empire in Colonial Guatemala.” This project explores the ways music and listening factored into colonial geographical surveys of Guatemala’s diverse landscapes and indigenous populations.
Her research and teaching interests include global music history, Central American history, Latin American popular music, eighteenth-century music, and music and nature. She received her undergraduate degree in music education from the University of South Carolina and a PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University.
Workshop Guests
Ameera Nimjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music and in South Asian Studies at Yale University. Her work focuses on the study of citizenship, race, and gender in transnational South Asian performance cultures. She is currently at work on two larger projects: on creativity in contemporary dance economies and performance cultures that have accompanied the migration of Muslims through South Asia, East and South Africa, and North America. Her essays have been published in Ethnologies and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism as well as volumes on music, dance, and diasporic performance.
Jessica Gabriel Peritz is Assistant Professor of Music and Affiliated Faculty in Italian Studies and Early Modern Studies at Yale University. A cultural historian of the long eighteenth century, she studies the relationships between bodies and politics in Italian opera. Her award-winning first book, The Lyric Myth of Voice: Civilizing Song in Enlightenment Italy, was published in 2022 by the University of California Press, and she has articles published in the Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of Musicology, and JAMS, and forthcoming in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. Her scholarship has won prizes from, among others, the AMS, the Modern Language Association, and the American Academy in Rome. Her current book project, entitled Histories Out of Time, interrogates the assumptions of modern historiography–musical and otherwise–by exploring pre-Enlightenment notions of history and temporality through Metastasian opera.
Presenters
(alphabetical by last name)
Danny Paul Allen is a graduate student in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He completed his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Piano Pedagogy at Campbell University, where he studied with Dr. Richard McKee. His current work focuses on the music of Japanese Americans in the World War II Incarceration Camps and how musical practice affected the identities of those incarcerated. His other interests include the Kabuki theater and the shakuhachi, the latter of which he is a student of, under the guidance of Markus Guhe. In addition to his scholarship, Danny teaches piano lessons in the Chapel Hill and South Durham areas in North Carolina.
Fabricio Cavero integrates composition, performance, investigation and pedagogy in his musicianship. His music education passed through diverse stages as student and teacher in Cusco, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Texas. He holds a bachelor in viola performance (TCU, 2012) and a master’s in music theory and composition (SMU, 2015). In 2020 he attended the master’s program at UNTREF in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he was a teaching assistant and member of the Orquesta de Instrumentos Autóctonos y Nuevas Tecnologías. Here, he learned sound synthesis and to replicate Pre-Columbian aerophones made of clay. Fabricio orbits between popular music (Andean Folklore, Rock, Cumbia) and academic music (Orchestral, Chamber, Vocal, and Computer Music), which are inspired by his commitment with his Andean Traditions, especially with the Pilgrimage to “El Señor de Coyllority”. Currently he attends the Integrated Composition, Improvisation and Technology Ph. D. program at the UC Irvine.
Jacob Collins is a PhD candidate in musicology and a teaching assistant at the University of North Texas. He holds both a bachelor’s degree in music education and a master’s degree in musicology from Texas Christian University. Collins’s primary research area is jazz and popular music, but he also studies jazz and its functions in video games. Collins’s dissertation is about the intersections of jazz and popular music as it relates to jazz historiography. He is primarily concerned with studying the variety of jazz expression outside common narratives used to tell jazz history. Collins won the Hewitt-Oberdoerffer Award for best student submission from the American Musicological Society-Southwest Chapter and has presented at their regional conference. Outside of musicology, Collins loves to garden and play video games.
Rafael (Ardi) Echevarria is a musicologist and music theorist specialising in nineteenth-century musical form and musicology’s disciplinary debates. Ardi is completing a PhD at Durham University, supported by the Northern Bridge Consortium’s Doctoral Training Partnership and the Ramsay Centre’s Postgraduate Scholarship. He earned First Class Honours (2019) and Masters (2022) degrees from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and is currently a Visiting Fellow (2024) at Harvard University. Ardi has presented his research at numerous international conferences and taught at the Sydney Conservatorium and Durham. He is currently secretary for the Musicological Society of Australia’s Sydney chapter, student representative for the Society for Music Analysis, and lead Early Career Researcher representative for the Centre for Nineteenth-century Studies.
Paul David Flood (he/him) is a musicologist whose research explores intersections of genre, geopolitics, and identity in global popular and avant-garde musics. He is currently a Ph.D. Candidate and Instructor of Music History at the Eastman School of Music. His dissertation explores musical performances of migrant and diasporic identities in the Eurovision Song Contest, its global spinoffs, and its dedicated nightlife spaces. He holds a M.F.A. in Musicology from the University of California, Irvine, and a B.A. in Music from Westminster Choir College. He currently sits in the Graduate Student Seat on the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music’s (IASPM) US Branch. In April and May 2024, he will join the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University in Malmö, Sweden as a Visiting Research Affiliate during the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest.
Samantha Hark is a second year Musicology Master’s Student at Indiana University Bloomington. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Stony Brook University. Her research interests are rather varied, including (but not limited to) music and trauma, music in internet cultures, popular music studies, and music and magic. Broadly, however, her passions are public musicology and inclusive music histories. Her undergraduate honors thesis, “Demystification as a Means to Preserve Classical Music,” explores the boundaries to classical music, and offers suggestions to make the repertoire more accessible and friendly to general audiences. Outside of musicology, Sam spends her time writing, participating in various choirs, and casually researching animal husbandry.
Raymond Jennings is a third year PhD student in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. He received his BA in Geography with a minor in French and Francophone studies from Kennesaw State University in his native Atlanta, GA in 2014. Following up thereafter, he completed his MA in Geography with an emphasis on Culture, Politics, and Heritage at Paris-Sorbonne University in 2019. He has also worked as a gallery guide at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta where he developed an interest in the African American Expat writers living in Paris. His interest in sound studies stems from his experience abroad there alongside his reading of Clyde Woods’ concept of the Blues epistemology that theorizes the blues and its present-day extensions, namely rap and hip hop, as an aesthetic politics. It is the resonance of this aesthetic politics with the lived experiences of Afro-descendant youth communities living in the French suburbs today that drives Mr. Jennings research, where his current field site is located.
Ravi Krishnaswami is the Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Visiting Professor of Music at Amherst College and a PHD candidate in musicology and ethnomusicology at Brown University researching how technology, political economy, and creativity intersect in the world of music for media. His dissertation research focuses on AI and automation in music for media. He is a composer and sound-designer for advertising, television, and games, and is the co-founder of the award-winning production company COPILOT Music + Sound. His composition work has appeared in the Super Bowl, on networks including ESPN and HBO, and in AAA video game soundtracks for games such as Fallout and Dishonored. He also performs regularly as guitarist in NYC’s tribute to The Smiths, has studied sitar with Srinivas Reddy, and premiered concert works for acoustic instruments and live processing, studying with Lu Wang and Butch Rovan.
Anushka Kulkarni is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis. Her research interests lie at the intersection of opera studies, postcolonial studies, and Bengali musical drama. Her dissertation entitled “The Empire Sings Back: Operatic Histories of British-Indian Colonial Encounter” observes the complex and contradictory presence of coloniality and empire in musical drama. This research has been supported through a Davis Humanities Institute summer fellowship, as well as a Critical Languages Scholarship.
Bethany Lambert is a composer, musician, attorney, and mother. Bethany received her Bachelor of Music in Music Composition from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2007 where she was fortunate to study under David Heuser, James Balentine, and James Syler. Shortly after receiving her degree, Bethany took a hiatus from composing to raise her young family. Inspired by her differently-abled children, Bethany chose to pursue a law degree to better support her family and the disabled community. Bethany attended Mitchell Hamline School of Law where the study of copyright law reignited her passion for music composition. Bethany received her JD in 2018 and now practices law and arpeggios. She is currently working towards her Master of Music in Music Composition at the University of Georgia under the tutelage of Adrien Childs, Emily Koh, and Tom Hiel. Bethany is the third-place winner of the 2023 American Prize Pop/Lite Composition.
Andreas (Zichen) Liu is a PhD student in the English Department at Harvard University, with a secondary field in musicology. His research focuses on Renaissance English, Italian, and Latin literature, particularly the genres of romance-epic and humanist historiography. Apart from working with literary texts, he is also interested in exploring the relation between music, language, and literature in the Renaissance and in the 20th century. His MA thesis concerns itself with the use of the acoustic device of echo in 16th- and 17th-century music, poetry, and scientific writings.
Ashley Martin is a teacher, writer, and academic advisor from Tucson, AZ. She attended Spelman College, The University of Arizona, and Northern Arizona University, earning an undergraduate degree in Music Education, an M.M. in Vocal Performance, and a graduate certificate in Ethnic Studies. Ashley taught in Tucson Unified School District for nine years as a music educator and arts integration specialist before transitioning to academic advising at Northern Arizona University. She enjoys writing about race, music, and culture.
Evan Martin-Casler A long-time educator and music enthusiast, Evan Martin-Casler is interested in the formation of communities around musical subcultures. He is especially invested in anarchist DIY spaces as potential scenes of refuge and creativity for historically marginalized subjects. He is finishing his thesis at Tufts University in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice Leadership program, and he teaches writing and communication at the University of Arizona.
Margaret McCurry (she/her) is a doctoral candidate studying Medieval Literature at New York University. Fascinated by the moments when words fail to fully capture or articulate meaning, her theoretical interests lie in philosophies of mediation and signification, musicology and sound studies, and disability studies. Her dissertation, “Vox in absentia: Reading the (Dis)embodied Voice in Late Medieval Britain,” interrogates the concept of voice as it deconstructs the binaries of presence/absence, immanence/transcendence, and embodiment/disembodiment in medieval literature. In her former life, Margaret was a classically trained singer and the author of “Sound and Silence: A Psychoanalytic Analysis of Menotti’s The Medium.” Today, she wants to extend her heartfelt thanks to the organizers, participants, and attendees of this Symposium for their support in her endeavors to harmonize her vocal praxis with her theoretical scholarship.
Ben Papsun is a second year PhD student in English at Tufts University. He received his BA in English from Vassar College with minors in Music Composition and Philosophy, and his MPhil in English from Cambridge University. Ben’s research interests include 20th-century American literature, critical and cultural theory, and jazz and improvisation. He is interested in the affinities shared by reading and improvisation, particularly as illustrated by the artistic practice of Ornette Coleman and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Ben is also an avid jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, performing with the Tufts Jazz Orchestra as well as within his home community of New Haven.
Amanda Paruta is a PhD student in historical musicology and music theory at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Broadly, her work grapples with questions of race, gender, and class with particular interest in voice. Committed to activism and community engagement, Paruta is currently researching structures of classical music organizations and forms of institutionalized inequality as a Western New York Prosperity Fellow. Paruta also serves as president of the Music Graduate Student Association at the University at Buffalo.
Savannah Rose Ridley is a doctoral student in ethnomusicology at Indiana University – Bloomington with a background in historical musicology as well as in flute performance. They are currently serving as the Editorial Assistant for the Society for Ethnomusicology. Savannah’s research primarily explores the interlocking roles of sound, devotion, the breath, and ecological activism in the International Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism. Their other research interests include poetics, ethics, grief and death studies, constructions of silence, more-than-human sounding/hearing, and conceptions of inner voice in both devotional and literary contexts. In their free hours, Savannah can usually be found with poets (by trade or disposition), or else, walking slowly and listening in their beloved local park.
Sunday Oluwaseun Ukaewen is a graduate student in the music department at Harvard University. I have a BA degree from the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife and an MA degree in music theory and composition from the University of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria. My research focuses on intercultural music, such as Yoruba popular and art music. Sunday is currently engaging the concept of decoloniality in Yoruba art music. My interest is not only in decolonial thought but also in its praxis, especially when composers of the genre approached interculturality as a tool for decolonial praxis. Additionally, I am interested in the politics of identity formation as exemplified by Yoruba composers’ decisions about which sonic ambiance—Western or Yoruba—should predominate their compositions and the politics of choice in how they select pitches to reinforce their predetermined ambiance.