Alumni
Music & Multimedia Composition Alumni
Amber Vistein
Amber Vistein (Ph.D. '22) is a composer and sound artist who delves deeply into the poetics of timbre, texture, and gesture. She has been praised for her conceptual “acuity” (Big, Red, and Shiny) and “blooming phrases” (New Music Box). Her work spans acoustic composition, opera, cinematic sound, and sound installation. Amber holds a B.A. in Music & Philosophy from New College of Florida and an MFA in Sonic Arts from Massachusetts College of Art. She was also a 2017-19 Composition Fellow with American Opera Project’s Composers and the Voice program. Her dissertation project, a multi-media chamber opera entitled Dark Exhalation, was awarded grants from the Brown Arts Institute and New Music USA. Vistein is Assistant Professor of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College.
Martim S. Galvão
Martim Galvão (Ph.D. '22) is a composer, percussionist, intermedia artist, and Assistant Professor in Music Technology in the Department of Music at California State University, San Bernardino. Much of his work is concerned with patterns, cycles and repetition. He is especially interested in exploring ideas related to consumerism and internet culture. Galvão earned his bachelor’s degree from Emory University. In 2014 he graduated from the Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology (ICIT) MFA program at the UC Irvine. martim.xyz
Marcel Sagesser
Marcel Sagesser's (Ph.D. '21) artistic practice ranges from “living installations” with human performers carrying sound objects through outdoor sites, to multimedia solo performances that he calls “post techno beat music.” In his research at Brown, “Within the Grid: Inquiries in the Socio-Rhythmic Ambiguities of Mechanical Time,” he investigated rhythm with an interdisciplinary framework that encompasses the socio-cultural background of groove and the politics of playing along mechanical time. Sagesser is Assistant Professor in Media Arts and Technology in the School of Design at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. marcelzaes.com
Alexander Dupuis
Alexander Dupuis (Ph.D. '20) is an artist and performer who enjoys plugging things back into themselves. He creates pieces and performances with light, sound, and code, and is particularly interested in the surprises and self-organized behaviors that can come out of algorithmic processes and electronic feedback. His current research focuses on experimental film as a means of inducing uncanny experiences. Outside of his solo work, Alexander Dupuis is active as a guitarist in the Happy Valley Band as well as the Verdant Vibes new music collective, and he is a member of the multimedia theater collective h0t club. alexanderdupuis.com
Nicole Carroll
Nicole Carroll (Ph.D. '19) is a composer, performer, sound designer, and builder working with audio, video, and tangible objects. Her work spans installation, improvisation, and fixed media performance, across noise, soundscape, and acousmatic genres. She is active as a sound designer and composer in theatre, performs electronic music under the alias “n0izmkr,” and builds custom synthesisers, controllers, and performance sensor systems. Her research focuses on generative systems that merge analog and digital technologies to create musical performance systems from non-musical sources. Nicole’s works have been performed internationally in USA, Mexico, Wales, Germany, Greece, Australia, and China, including at SEAMUS, ICMC, and NIME conferences. Carroll is Senior Lecturer in Music at the Queensland University of Technology. nicolecarrollmusic.com
Akiko Hatakeyama
Akiko Hatakeyama (Ph.D. '19) is a composer/performer of electroacoustic music and intermedia. She explores the boundaries between written music, improvisation, electronics, real-time computer-based interactivity, and visual media. Hatakeyama is a founding member of OPENSIGNAL, a collective of artists concerned with the state of gender and race in experimental electronic-based sound and art practices. Hatakeyama has performed and presented her work in the US, Europe, Japan, and South Korea including at Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, International Computer Music Conference, International Symposium on Electronic Art, and International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, where she won the Best Music Performance award in 2018. She is Associate Professor in the Music Technology program at the University of Oregon in Eugene. akikohatakeyama.com
Jinku Kim
Jinku Kim (Ph.D. '19) is a composer, performer, and multimedia artist whose work focuses on pushing the boundaries of interaction through sound installation and audio visual performances. His works have been presented at REDCAT in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Whitney Museum of American Art, STEIM in Amsterdam, the New Children’s Museum in San Diego, and Machine Project in Los Angeles. He is Assistant Professor of Practice at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. grayscale64.com/
Luke Moldof
Luke Moldof (Ph.D. '19) is a Providence and New York based artist, currently focused on sound and photography. For the past few years his work has been largely made up of unedited and unprocessed location recordings, acknowledging the tropes of “field recording” as a genre, seeking to operate outside them or to address them in uncommon ways. He uses similar methods of exploration and critique to produce photographic works, in an attempt to highlight the consonance and dissonance between these two practices. Luke studied jazz guitar at the New England Conservatory and was active for a time in the American noise scene. Past areas of interest included: improvisation, tape / concrete music, and synthesis, though they’re largely on the back burner. He discovered a love for animals, which manifested itself in his parrot recording, “Kiki & Kiki” featured on his split LP with Peter Ablinger on Banh Mi Verlag. He is passionate about the Nashville and Bakersfield sounds and practices pedal steel, lap steel, and chicken pickin’ guitar as much as he can.
Asha Tamirisa
Asha Tamirisa (Ph.D. '19) works with sound and image and researches media histories. Particular interests include tool-building with both software and hardware, experimental music and film, and intermedia composition/installation. Asha's research integrates media archeological methods with feminist science and technology studies perspectives, looking closely and critically at often forgotten elements and conditions of media. Asha is a founding member of OPENSIGNAL, a group of artists concerned with the state of gender and race in electronic music/art practices. Asha is Assistant Professor of Music at Bates College. ashatamirisa.net
Brian House
Brian House (Ph.D. '18) is an artist who investigates the politics of time in human and nonhuman systems. Incorporating sound, computation, and multidisciplinary research, his practice has traversed subjects from geolocation infrastructure to urban rats. He has exhibited at MoMA, MOCA Los Angeles, Ars Electronica, ZKM, Madrid CentroCentro, Stockholm Kulturhuset, Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, and Science Gallery Bengaluru, among others. The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, Neural, Creative Applications, and TIME’s annual “Best Inventions” issue have featured his work, and his essays and articles have been published in Leonardo, the Journal of Sonic Studies, and e-flux Architecture. He has been an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam, Djerassi, and the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab, a research scholar at Columbia University's Center for Spatial Research, and in a past life he worked at The New York Times. He is Assistant Professor of Art at Amherst College. brianhouse.net
Seth Thorn
Seth D. Thorn (Ph.D. '18) is an American violinist whose research encompasses interaction design and philosophical approaches to computational media. His work interrogates normativity and cognitivism in HCI through a variety of computational tools and theoretical perspectives informed by sound and music techniques. Thorn is a Principal Investigator (PI) for the National Science Foundation (NSF), where he leads projects that align with his commitment to expanding diversity and inclusion in computing. He is also the founder and principal of Matter Squared LLC, a grant-funded Ed Tech company that licenses IP created by Thorn. Thorn has published in premier journals and top-tier conferences spanning philosophy and critical theory, music, and human-computer interaction, including Leonardo Music Journal (MIT), Qui Parle (UC Berkeley), Wearable Technologies (Cambridge), Organised Sound (Cambridge), numerous ACM conferences (TEI, C&C, MOCO, and Audio Mostly), NIME, ICMC, IEEE RESPECT, and xCoax. He has performed on his violin interfaces at top conferences and music festivals, including the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), the International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI), the Conference of the Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS), the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF), and the New York City Electroacoustic Improvisation Summit (NYCEIS). His work has been recognized twice at the prestigious Guthman Competition at Georgia Tech and was featured in Electronic Sound Magazine. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University. www.seththorn.net
Caroline Park
Caroline Park (Ph.D '17) is a composer, musician, and artist working primarily within minimal means. Park has shared the stage with Mem1, Steve Roden, a canary torsi, Evidence, Dollshot, and Arnold Dreyblatt, and has performed at the Stone (NYC), AS220 (Providence), and in Jordan Hall (Boston). Solo releases can be found on cassette, CD, and in digital formats via labels Private Chronology, Bathetic Records, VisceralMediaRecords, Pure Potentiality Records and Absence of Wax. A member of the electro-improv quartet BUMPR (with Peter Bussigel, Stephan Moore, and Tim Rovinelli) and Park sometimes plays under the solo moniker CHYP. Park has taught at Connecticut College and at the Emily Carr School of Art and Design in Vancouver and is currently based in Los Angeles.
Mark Cetilia
Mark Cetilia (Ph.D '16) is a sound / media artist working at the nexus of analog and digital technologies. Exploring the possibilities of generative systems in art, design, and sound practice, Cetilia’s work is an exercise in carefully controlled chaos. He is a member of the media art group Redux, recipients of a Creative Capital grant in Emerging Fields, and the electroacoustic ensemble Mem1, described by The Grove Dictionary of American Music as “a complex cybernetic entity” whose “evolving, custom-built systems are as important an aspect of the duo’s achievements as their ever-innovative sound.” Cetilia holds an MFA in Digital + Media from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he currently teaches classes on art, technology, and sound. His sound works have been published by Interval, Radical Matters, Dragon’s Eye, and Estuary Ltd., which he runs with his partner Laura. mark.cetilia.org/
Kristina Wolfe
Kristina Wolfe (Ph.D. '16) is a composer, wanderer, electronic musician, maker, and multi-instrumentalist. She is of Danish and American heritage, and spent many of her formative years wandering through the forests listening to the sounds of space and place. This environment cultivated her imagination and creative focus on the spirits of the past, and has inspired her work and listening practices up to the present day. Kristina is a MSCA Senior Researcher, VRAASP— University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK. kristinawolfemusic.wordpress.com/
Stephan Moore
Stephan Moore (Ph.D. '15) is a sound artist, sound designer, composer, improviser, maker, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His creative work manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvisational outbursts, sound installations, scores for collaborative performances, algorithmic compositions, interactive art, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. His collaborations with sound artist Scott Smallwood (as electronic duo Evidence) and choreographer Yanira Castro (in her company A Canary Torsi) span more than a decade. He is the curator of sound art for the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, organizing annual exhibitions since 2014. He is also the president of Isobel Audio LLC, which builds and sells his Hemisphere loudspeakers. He was the touring music coordinator and sound engineer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for several years, and has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Anthony McCall, and Animal Collective, among many others. Moore is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Sound Arts and Industries Program at Northwestern University. http://www.oddnoise.com/
Blevin Blectum
Blevin Blectum (Blevin Kelley Ph.D. '14) is an electronic music / multimedia composer, performer, and sound designer residing with avian animals in Seattle WA. Incorporating elements of text, video, acoustic and electronic instruments, her multimedia work is centered around a scored musical core, and inspired by the imagined realms of radio plays and speculated science fictions. Working solo and in collaboration she has released dozens of critically acclaimed recordings since 1998. As the duo Blectum from Blechdom, with long-time collaborator Kristin Grace Erickson, she received the Digital Music Award of Distinction at the Prix Ars Electronica 2001 in Linz, Austria. She is a recent co-founder of the Traveling Bubble Ensemble, with co-composer and violist Michael Kelley, violinist Elise Kuder, and performer/builder Marjorie Gere. Blevin's work has been featured and reviewed in publications including Wire magazine (UK), Neural, Pitchfork, Time Out (New York and London), Signal to Noise, Art Forum, Blow Up (Italy), Vogue (Italy), and Rolling Stone. http://www.blevinblectum.com/
Peter Bussigel
Peter Bussigel (Ph.D. '14) builds sound systems that become instruments, performances, sculptures, and less general interanimata. Peter also makes music with brass instruments and electrons. Bussigel is Assistant Professor of New Media and Sound Art at the Emily Carr University of Art & Design. https://www.triangleline.com/
Freida Abtan
Freida Abtan (Ph.D. '13) is a Canadian audiovisual composer and multi-disciplinary artist with a keen interest in immersive media. She works between fixed and real-time computational technologies in sound and video for concert diffusion, installation, and large-scale multimedia performance situations. Her music ranges from acousmatic composition to more industrial and pop-influenced experimental performance. Both as a solo artist, and as a floating member of the renowned experimental music group Nurse with Wound, she has toured her music and visuals internationally. Her compositions, performances, and installations have been featured at ICMC, the Spark Festival of Electronic Music, Mutek, The Elektra Festival, and Cap Sembrat amongst many others. Abtan is Assistant Professor of Electronic Music Composition at Carnegie Mellon University. https://www.freidaabtan.com/
Griffin Byron
Griffin Byron (formally Robert Griffin Byron, Ph.D '13) is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, 3D animator and UX Designer. His creative work focuses on paint, sculpture, sound, 3D animation and video to create audiovisual pieces that explores the relationship between the organic and the synthetic, often through the deconstruction and abstraction of the world through physical computing technologies. He draws inspiration from natural forms, from molecular mechanisms to the five elements of traditional philosophy, he attempts to understand through his art the hidden structures of manifest nature. http://griffinbyron.studio/ & https://griffinbyron.artstation.com/.
Jacob Richman
Jacob Richman (Ph.D. '13) Richman's creative work focuses on unique performance settings and mixtures of composition for live performers, media arts, and site-specific installations. He feels that exploring relationships between sounds, images, live performers, space, and movement is an effective way to both investigate and convey greater connections that surround us. His recent work also explores the practice of "roving performances"—those in which the audience moves to experience the piece. He is interested in how movement through a performance setting can help express complex topics such as personal and collective loss, and expose the hidden linkages between things. He has taught at the University of Michigan (Ann Artbor), the University of Rhode Island, and is currently a lecturer at the Portland State University School of Art & Design in Portland, Oregon. https://www.jacob-richman.com
Matthew Peters Warne
Matthew Peters Warne (Ph.D. '13) is a composer and installation artist who creates work to explore the role we play in our own perception. Warne creates electronic instruments and software to manipulate recordings of everyday soundscapes in live performance. His recordings are drawn primarily from Angola, in southern Africa, as part of an effort to understand the intersection between emerging, resource-rich nations and changing global cultures. Warne is an Instructor in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University. http://matthewwarne.com/
Lyn Goeringer
Lyn Goeringer (Ph.D. '11) is a composer and intermedia artist who works with video, sound, and light. She creates video art for gallery installation, live performance, and dance. Her work is often playful but complex, engaging with everyday objects toward abstract results. Goeringer taught film and video at the University of Rhode Island and held a Visiting Assistant Professor of Electronic Music and Digital Arts position in the TIMARA program at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Goeringer is Assistant Professor of Computer Music at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. http://www.lyngoeringer.com/portfolio/
Brian Knoth
Brian Knoth (Ph.D. '11) is a media artist, composer, and educator specializing in music composition/production, sound design, digital video, computer graphics, and interactive multimedia. This work has been realized in several formats including electro-acoustic music, audio-visual composition, digital video art, interactive multimedia performance/installation, and interactive systems for mind-body rehabilitation. Generally speaking, his creative work and research in multimedia explores ideas related to multi-sensory perception/integration, multi-modal communication, empathy, and human-computer/environment interaction. Knoth is Associate Professor of Media Communications at Rhode Island College. http://brianknoth.com/
Kevin Patton
Kevin Patton (Ph.D. '11) is an artist and speculative designer whose primary mode of making is through creating interactive systems. He is active in the fields of multimedia theatre, experimental music, collaborative design, and interactive art. Kevin is also a frequent collaborator in installation, network art, and performance art projects. Kevin is Assistant Professor of Interaction Design at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. https://corcoran.gwu.edu/kevin-patton
Shawn Greenlee
Shawn Greenlee (Ph.D. ’08) is a composer, sound artist, and Professor at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) where he leads the Studio for Research in Sound & Technology (SRST). His recent work explores spatial audio, high density loudspeaker arrays, and erratic sound synthesis techniques. Greenlee has been active as a solo electronic / electroacoustic improvisor since 1997 and has toured extensively across the US and Europe. Conference and festival performances include New Interfaces for Musical Expression (2018 Blacksburg, 2015 Baton Rouge, 2014 London, 2013 Daejeon), International Computer Music Conference (2021 Santiago, 2018 Daegu, 2011 Huddersfield, 2005 Barcelona), BEAST FEaST (2017 Birmingham), PdCon16 (2016 New York), Cube Fest (2019, 2016 Blacksburg), Re-new (2013 Copenhagen), IN TRANSIT (2008 Berlin), and Elevate (2007 Graz), among others. https://shawngreenlee.com/
Jamie Jewett
Jamie Jewett (Ph.D. '08) is the director of Lostwax Multimedia Dance, a multi-media dance theater company that seeks to examine the visceral cusp between installation, performance space and narrative through the use of technology. Jewett has been an artist in residence at HERE Center for the Arts in New York, at STEIM in Amsterdam, and at Perishable Theater in Providence, RI. His works such as After the Fall (Danspace at St. Mark's), as well as Seven Veils (HERE), Rest/Less (HERE,), Snowblind (University of Michigan IMMEDIA commission), Kindly Bent to Ease Us, and as far back to the evening length works Glyph (1996), Cloud In Trousers (1997) utilize interactivity, cinematic imagery and live video. His on-going collaborations with author Thalia Field also include an online multimedia piece, Zoologic and SEVEN VEILS. His recent full length works MELT, BLINKING, and SEVEN VEILS were commissions from the Firstworks Providence Festival, where they premiered. Lostwax on Vimeo.
Thomas Ciufo
Thomas Cuifo (Ph.D. '04) is a sound artist, composer, improviser, and researcher working at the intersections of electroacoustic performance, interactive instrument design, sonic art and emerging digital technologies. Additional research and teaching interests include audio recording and production, acoustic ecology and listening practices, and innovative approaches to teaching, learning, and career development. He has taught at Smith College, Towson University, and is currently serving as Associate Professor of Music at Mount Holyoke College. http://www.ciufo.org/
Musicology & Ethnomusicology Alumni
Katie Freeze Wolf
Katie Freeze Wolf (Ph.D. '23) studies the diverse music cultures of the mountainous “roof of the world” of South and Central Asia. She plays the Western Tibetan ko-phongs and the Pamiri rubob and tanbur, and her dissertation, "The Making of Pamiri Music in Tajikistan," explored the impact of early Soviet cultural development and social engineering on contemporary musical performance and representation among Ismaili Muslims living in Tajik Badakhshan. Katie holds music degrees from the University of Washington and, before coming to Brown, worked as a pianist, composer, and arranger. For the academic year 2023-2024 Katie holds a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of Music at Brown University through the Dean’s Faculty Fellowship program.
Luis Achondo
Luis Achondo (Ph.D. '21) is a HILLS Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. He holds a Ph.D. in Musicology and Ethnomusicology from Brown University. Drawing on ethnographic material from long-term fieldwork in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, his current book project examines how sound mediates (anti)social and translocal relations among soccer fans in Latin America’s Southern Cone. He previously researched the role of music in the work of writer Pedro Lemebel and Andrés Segovia’s mediation of the history of the classical guitar. His projects have been generously funded by Fulbright, Tinker, and Conicyt, and his work has been published in edited volumes, Ethnomusicology Forum, Latin American Music Review, and Journal of Musicological Research. He was awarded the James T. Koetting Prize (2021), the LACSEM Prize (2017), and received an Honorable Mention in the LACSEM Prize (2019).
Kathleen (Kate) Haughey
Kathleen Haughey (Ph.D. '21) is the Executive Director at the Vermont Folklife Center, and a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology. For her MA, Kathleen co-led an audio documentary project with Mbyá-Guarani musicians in southern Brazil. This project focused on the importance of negotiation and collaboration in small, community-led ethnographic projects. Kate’s dissertation explores the roles of music and dance in the Bhutanese Nepali refugee communities in Vermont. www.vermontfolklifecenter.org
Louis-Emmanuel Wenger
Louis-Emmanuel Wenger (Ph.D. '21) specializes in the musics of Centra Asia and the Middle East, with a strong emphasis on Iran and the wider Persian speaking world. Additionally, his interest extends to West Africa and the Maghreb. His dissertation explores music practices in and around the Persian Gulf from a transnational perspective. Prior to earning his Ph.D. at Brown, Louis worked for the Aga Khan Music Initiative, an interregional music and arts education program with worldwide performance, outreach, mentoring, and artistic production activities to support talented musicians and music educators working to preserve, transmit, and further develop their musical heritage in contemporary forms. Louis earned a B.A. in Music Studies and an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
Violet Cavicchi Munoz
Violet Cavicchi Munoz (Ph.D. '20) researched the workings of Andean music technoculture that links past and present, urban and rural, and people of varied ethnic, racial, and class positions. She focuses on personalized and communal uses of music in radio broadcasting, music video production, and home recordings of live performances of the bandurria, a string instrument from Cusco. She received her B.A. at Vassar College in Anthropology with a correlate in Music and Culture and wrote her senior thesis on mixing music as a means of cultural intermediation for Latin DJs in NYC.
Jamie Corbett
Jamie Corbett (Ph.D. '19) holds a B.Mus from the University of Toronto and an A.M from Brown. Her research has focused on the cultural and formal politics of traditional music in Florianopolis, an island city in southern Brazil. The dissertation, entitled Public Lore, examines the origin discourses surrounding traditional music genres, traditional musicians’ interactions with public funding, and folklore’s place in the public sphere of Brazil’s conservative South.
Byrd McDaniel
Byrd McDaniel (Ph.D. '19) researches popular music reception in the United States, emphasizing listening, disability, and digital cultures. His forthcoming book, titled Spectacular Listening: Music and Disability in the Digital Age, features case studies on air guitar competitions, lip syncing, music podcasts, reaction videos, and the many ways people transform listening into a public performance. Prior to attending Brown, Byrd received an M.A. in American studies at the University of Alabama. He has designed and taught courses at Northeastern University, University of Alabama, and Tufts University. He has held positions as a Fox Center Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University, Visiting Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, and Project Manager for the Hyundai Research Collaborative at Rhode Island School of Design. Byrd's work eventually brought him back to Brown, and he currently works in the Graduate School as the Assistant Director of Student Development. https://byrdmcdaniel.com/
Esther Kurtz
Esther Kurtz (Ph.D. '18) is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of Music at Washington University in St. Louis, and she will continue there as Assistant Professor of Music effective July 2019. She will be teaching two courses a semester in topics such as American Popular Music, Ethnographic Methods and Ethics, and Jazz History, as well as continuing to develop her research on capoeira Angola in Brazil.
David Fossum
David Fossum (Ph.D. '17) is a Postdoctoral Fellow, Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. He begins an appointment as Assistant Professor in the musicology program at Arizona State University in January 2019. Dave has a B.A. in English/Comparative Literature from George Mason University and an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University. His M.A. thesis draws on music analysis and ethnographic data to explore innovation and transmission among musicians of the Ahal School of instrumental Turkmen dutar performance, which he began studying while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkmenistan. His Turkmen research has culminated in two peer-reviewed articles, one published in the journal Ethnomusicology in 2015 and one forthcoming in the journal Analytical Approaches to World Music. His dissertation, titled “A Cult of Anonymity in the Age of Copyright: Authorship, Ownership, and Cultural Policy in Turkey’s Music Industry,” examines how actors in Turkey challenge, exploit, and seek to implement the country’s developing intellectual property regime.
Francesca Inglese
Francesca Inglese (Ph.D. '16) is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Northeastern University. Her dissertation, "Coloured Moves and Klopse Beats: Minstrel Legacies in Cape Town, South Africa,” received Brown's Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award. She received her BA in music (with a focus on composition) from Vassar College and an MA in ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. She has studied, performed, and taught Baroque, Jazz, and Carnatic violin/viola while living in Scotland, India, and Iceland, and played in a range of musical ensembles. Her MA thesis focused on the various musical interactions and encounters amongst African American and Jewish women vaudeville performers in the early 20th century as well as the sonic and embodied legacy of blackface minstrelsy in the performances of Sophie Tucker. Her current ethnographic dissertation research explores the music and dance practices, public parades, and youth development projects of minstrel troupes in Cape Town in relation to questions of coloured subjectivity, urban spatial politics, and corporeal knowledge in post-apartheid South Africa.
Dave Wood
Dave Wood (Ph.D. '15) is an Instructor in Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University. His dissertation research examines the correlation of musical structure, affect, and personality factors in the Appalachian old-time music revival community, and this is indicative of my general interest in a cognitive approach to ethnomusicology. He explored the relationship between music and emotion cross-culturally, the evolutionary origins of music, and implicit musical knowledge in music production and reception from an interdisciplinary perspective. From a humanistic standpoint, of interest to Wood are the uses of audio technology, musical taste and identity, musical appropriation, traditional music preservation initiatives, and music from Appalachia and the American South. https://appstudies.appstate.edu/faculty-staff/dave-wood
Bradley A. Hanson
Bradley A. Hanson (Ph.D. '14) is the Director of Folklife at the Tennessee Arts Commission. An ethnomusicologist and folklorist, he previously worked as a cultural interpreter for the Tennessee State Parks and the Friends of the Cumberland Trail. As part of the Cumberland Trail Music and Heritage project, his efforts included field research, archival management, interpretive writing, and record and radio production centered on regional culture and folklife. He has also collaborated on programming, preservation, and documentary projects with Humanities Tennessee, Campbell Cultural Coalition, Jubilee Community Arts and the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound. In 2011, he was given the Blanton Owen Fund Award from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to support his fieldwork with bluegrass, country and gospel musicians in East Tennessee. http://tnartscommission.org/staff/bradley-hanson/
Triin Vallaste
Triin Vallaste (Ph.D. '14) is the Academic Department Coordinator for Russian Studies at Amherst College.
Aleysia Whitmore
Aleysia Whitmore (Ph.D. '14) is Assistant Professor, Ethnomusicology, at University of Denver. Her research focuses on the world music industry, globalization, and cultural policy and she teaches popular music, world music, and classical music courses. During the 2018/2019 academic year, Aleysia will be a EURIAS research fellow. She will be conducting research on cultural policy and world music at the IMéRA research institute in Marseille, France. She is also finishing a book that examines West African and Cuban musics in the world music industry. Aleysia holds a BMus from the University of Toronto (Canada) and AM and PhD degrees in ethnomusicology from Brown University (USA). She has taught at Brown University, Boston College, the University of Miami and the University of Colorado Denver.
Benjamin R. Teitelbaum
Benjamin Teitelbaum (Ph.D. '13) is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology and Affiliate Faculty in International Affairs. He earned a Ph.D. from Brown University with auxiliary studies at the Royal College of Music, Stockholm and Harvard University, and a B.M., summa cum lade, in nyckelharpa performance from Bethany College. Prior to coming to the College of Music, Teitelbaum was Instructor and Head of Nordic Studies, also at the University of Colorado, Boulder. https://www.colorado.edu/music/benjamin-r-teitelbaum
Julie Hunter
Julie Hunter (Ph.D. ’12) is Assistant Professor at SUNY Potsdam. For the past five years, Julie has been bringing the music and cultural traditions of West Africa to students at The Crane School of Music. Hunter has taken seven trips to Ghana in West Africa to conduct research over the years—including her most recent trip this past August. Hunter described the field of ethnomusicology as the study of music and culture and people making music. The intriguing field of study allows students to learn about music and cultures from around the world, not just by the “classic” European composers. African musical traditions are hundreds of years old and have been passed down from generation to generation through oral traditions—influencing a number of styles, from Afropop to jazz. https://www.potsdam.edu/academics/Crane/MusicTheory/Music-History-Page/Hunter
Daniel Piper
Daniel Piper (Ph.D. ’12) is the Curator for Latin America and the Caribbean instruments at the The Musical Instrument Museum (MIM), Phoenix, AZ. Daniel Piper is a music scholar and multi-instrumentalist with a PhD in ethnomusicology from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He has conducted extensive field research in the Dominican Republic and northeast Brazil and has published on traditional music, popular religion, and dance from these countries. Piper’s dissertation is entitled, “Urbanization, Gender, and Cultural Emergence in the Music of Dominican Popular Religion: Salves and Palos in San Cristóbal.” He has also written numerous essays on topics such as improvisation in early jazz, musical modernization in Brazil, Cuban rumba and rap, and Afro-Dominican pilgrimage and processionals. Through long-term fieldwork projects, he has developed expertise in ethnographic interviewing, videography, and photography, which continue to serve him well in his work at MIM. https://mim.org/leadership/daniel-c-piper-phd/
Brent Wetters
Brent Wetters (Ph.D. ’12) is an adjunct teaching professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Special Lecturer at Providence College.
Erica Haskell
Erica Haskell (Ph.D. '11) is an Associate Professor of Music and Theater at the University of New Haven. Haskell’s research areas include the music of South Eastern Europe, the politics of music, applied ethnomusicology, post-war cultural redevelopment, refugee music as well as cultural policy in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina. https://www.newhaven.edu/faculty-staff-profiles/erica-haskell.php
Katy Leonard
Katy Leonard (Ph.D. ’11) is a Lecturer in Music at Harvard University. Her research interests include bluegrass music, hip hop culture, virtual and physical community, music and political movements, and the arts in civic and community engagement. Leonard's most recent publications focus on rapper/poet Kendrick Lamar, b-boy Richard "Crazy Legs" Colón, rapper/actor Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, and the history of Dirty South rap.
Maureen Loughran
Maureen Loughran (Ph.D. ’08) is the Director and Curator of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Prior to Folkways, Ms. Loughran was the Deputy Director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, New York City. She served for a number of years as a Senior Producer of American Routes, the nationally broadcast public radio program hosted by Nick Spitzer. While at American Routes, she produced over 80 two-hour programs and numerous segments that were broadcast nationally, including feature radio documentaries profiling Woody Guthrie, John Coltrane and Alan Lomax. Loughran conducted fieldwork to document Baton Rouge’s sacred and secular music traditions for the Folklife Program of the State of Louisiana’s Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism. Along with Spitzer, she was awarded an Archie Green Fellowship by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in 2010-2011. She has worked in various folk arts archives including the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin, Ireland, the National Archives, the Archive of Folk Culture and the Irish Music Archive at Boston College.
Clifford Murphy
Clifford Murphy (Ph.D. ’08) was appointed the director of Folk & Traditional Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts in August 2015. He oversees the NEA’s grantmaking in folk and traditional arts, and manages the NEA National Heritage Fellowships. Murphy was previously the director of Maryland Traditions, the folklife program of the Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC). In 2011, Murphy launched the state’s first Maryland Traditions Folklife Festival, and also managed the Maryland Traditions grant program supporting apprenticeships and projects. Murphy also produced the state's annual Achievement in Living Traditions and Arts (ALTA) Awards. In 2014, Murphy helped to establish a partnership with the University of Maryland Baltimore County to bring MSAC’s 40 years of folklife archives into the university library system, making the collection available to the public. https://www.arts.gov/staff/clifford-murphy
Birgit Berg
Birgit Berg (Ph.D. '07) has an extensive background in international media marketing including specialized knowledge of Asian media markets. She is currently the Operations Manager of the Business Development team at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). She oversees the day-to-day activities of a global marketing team working to promote and place the TV, Radio, and Digital content of five media houses on commercial media stations in foreign markets. Birgit has also served as the Regional Director of Marketing for the USAGM's East Asia/Pacific Office of Marketing in Bangkok, Thailand, where she was responsible for the promotion and placement of Voice of America and Radio Free Asia programming on media stations across Asia. She began her public service career as a Presidential Management Fellow, after completing a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Brown University. Birgit’s Ph.D. work, "The music of Arabs, the sound of Islam: Hadrami ethnic and religious presence in Indonesia,” focused on Islamic expressive culture in Indonesia.
Timothy J. Cooley
Timothy J. Cooley (Ph.D. '99) is Professor of Music in the Ethnomusicology Program at UC Santa Barbara. He specializes in vernacular and popular musics of Central Europe, especially Poland, and North America. His research interests include music and sports, tourism, and identities, the intellectual history of ethnomusicology, and ecologies of cultural practices. His edited volume, Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (Oxford University Press, 1997 and second edition 2008), is a standard text for students of ethnomusicology. His second book, Making Music in the Polish Tatras: Tourists, Ethnographers, and Mountain Musicians (Indiana University Press, 2005), won the 2006 Orbis Prize for Polish Studies (American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies). Cooley’s most recent book, Surfing about Music (University of California Press, 2014), was shortlisted for AMS’s Music in American Culture Award. Currently he is the editor and contributing author of Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy, a collection of essays forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press in 2019. From 2006-09 he was the editor of Ethnomusicology. He has published articles and chapters in encyclopedias and books such as The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Cambridge History of World Music, Encyclopedia of Global Religion, the leading textbook Worlds of Music, and in leading academic journals such as British Journal of Ethnomusicology, European Meetings in Ethnomusicology, and The World of Music. http://www.music.ucsb.edu/people/tim-cooley
Gregory Melchor-Barz
Gregory Melchor-Barz (Ph.D. '97) is a medical ethnomusicologist who has engaged field research in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania. He received the PhD from Brown University and the MA from the University of Chicago. A former opera singer, Barz is Alexander Heard Distinguished Professor at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University while holding the position of senior professor at the Odeion School of Music at the University of the Free State (South Africa). His latest book is a co-edited volume titled The Culture of AIDS in Africa: Hope and Healing in Music and the Arts, published by Oxford University Press.
Susan Hurley-Glowa
Susan Hurley-Glowa (Ph.D. '97) is both an ethnomusicologist and hornist. She began her studies as a hornist, completing degrees in performance in the US and at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, Germany, where she studied with Ifor James. Susan is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Horn at University of Texas Brownsville. When she is not in the Rio Grande Valley on the Mexican border, she lives with her husband and two sons in Fairbanks, Alaska, where her husband Josef Glowa (Ph.D. 1997 Brown University) is Associate Professor of German. As an ethnomusicologist, her research interests include Luso-African, Latin American, and Alaska Native music cultures. She has published numerous articles and an award winning documentary film on her research specialty, music of the Cape Verde Islands. She is the director of the newly established Center of Excellence for Latin American and Iberian Music at the University of Texas Brownville, and host of the weekly world music radio show Excursiones Musicales, broadcast throughout the Rio Grande Valley by the NPR station KMBH 88 FM in Harlingen, Texas.