Department of Music

Michael (Mike) Kinney (he/him) is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Music at Brown University. His research engages the politics and ethics of listening by asking how sociocultural narratives about the human life course shape sound and musical practices, communities, institutions, histories, and aesthetics. His first book project, An Aesthetics of Vocal Age: Singing, Performance, and the Politics of Decline centers issues of continuation, longevity, intergenerationalism, and relationships between disability aesthetics and aging embodiments in genres of vocal music to describe the ambivalences — and new possibilities — of using one’s voice over time. He has presented his research at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Modern Language Association, and several other national and international conferences. Mike is also the author of multiple book chapters, including on the coalescence of feminist embodiment, aging, and longevity in the Las Vegas residencies of Céline Dion and Cher (The Possibility Machine: Music and Myth in Las Vegas; University of Illinois Press, 2023); motherhood and the domestic politics of nineteenth-century touring musicians (Clara and Robert Schumann in Context; Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026), and aging voices and bodies in the musicals of Stephen Sondheim (Performing Sondheim: Interpreting the Composer’s Art; Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026).

Before coming to Brown, Mike was a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Center on Longevity. His work has been supported by the American Musicological Society, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is also a co-convener of the “Musicking in Old Age” study group, which brings together scholars to develop strategies and methodologies for studying old age and the life course in music and sound studies. Mike holds a PhD in Musicology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University.