People

Dana Gorzelany-Mostak

Dana Gorzelany-Mostak is a Professor of Music at Georgia College & State University. She is the founder of Trax on the Trail, a website and research project that tracks and catalogs the soundscapes of US presidential elections. Gorzelany-Mostak has provided her expert opinion for news outlets such as the BBC, Slate, CNN, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Newsweek, New York Times, and Politico. Her 2023 book, Tracks on the Trail: Popular Music, Race, and the US Presidency (University of Michigan Press), analyzes the official and unofficial musical activity surrounding 21st-century presidential campaigns.

S. Andrew Granade

S. Andrew Granade is Associate Dean of Academic and Faculty Affairs and Professor of Musicology at the UMKC Conservatory. His research centers on the American Experimental Tradition, particularly the composer and instrument builder Harry Partch. He is the author of Harry Partch, Hobo Composer (University of Rochester Press, 2014), contributing editor of the forthcoming The Musical Identities of Harry Partch (University of Rochester Press, 2026), and has published articles in Journal of the Society for American Music, Music and the Moving Image, and American Music. He also has an active interest in music history pedagogy, especially graduate teaching, and in film and television music, with a particular focus on science fiction which has led to a forthcoming book on Battlestar Galactica’s music from Palgrave Press.

Samantha Lampe

Samantha Lampe is a Ph.D. candidate in the musicology program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation, titled “What I Did for Love: Broadway and the ‘I Love New York’ Campaign (1977-1983),” examines the relationship between the League of New York Theatres and Producers and the New York State Government as Broadway became the central attraction of the “I Love New York” Campaign in television commercials and travel packages. Samantha has been a member of the Society for American Music since 2020. Her research has been financially supported by the Scott Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Larry Hackman Residency from the New York State Archives. Samantha has published in Studies in Musical Theatre and in the forthcoming edited volume Rodgers and Hammerstein in Context (Cambridge University Press). Her research interests include Broadway musicals, music tourism, music in urban spaces, and the music industry.

Megan MacDonald

Megan MacDonald is currently the Executive Director for the Society for American Music. In this role, she plans and executes the annual conference, manages fellowships, and provides organization-wide communications, works with donors and acts as a liaison between the board and staff of the organization.

Howard Pollack

Howard Pollack is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Music at the University of Houston, where he has taught since 1987.  Born in Brooklyn in 1952, he holds degrees from the University of Michigan and Cornell University, where he received a doctorate in musicology in 1981.  His eight books include award-winning biographies of composers Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Marc Blitzstein, and Samuel Barber, and lyricist-librettist John Latouche.  He is currently researching the life and music of the Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch.

Dwandalyn Reece

Dwandalyn R. Reece is Associate Director for the Humanities at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. She brings more than thirty-five years of experience in public humanities, including positions at the Motown Museum, the Louis Armstrong House and Archives, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She served for twelve years as NMAAHC’s Curator of Music and Performing Arts, where she curated the museum’s award-winning exhibition Musical Crossroads.

Her projects include the publication Musical Crossroads: Stories about the Objects of African American Music (2023), recipient of the 2025 Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize; contributing producer of the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap (2021); and co-curator of the Smithsonian Year of Music (2019) and Freedom Sounds: A Community Celebration for NMAAHC’s 2016 grand opening.

Reece has appeared on numerous media outlets, including NPR, The Washington Post, CBS This Morning, Vice News, and Al Jazeera, as well as on podcasts such as the award-winning SiriusXM series All Music Is Black Music, WTF with Marc Maron, and The Creative Process. She currently leads a Smithsonian-wide project on American music and the Declaration of Independence for the nation’s 250th anniversary and serves as a Board Member-at-Large for the Society for American Music. 

Gustavo Souza Marques

Gustavo Souza Marques is an ethnomusicologist, hip hop scholar, instrumental hip hop music producer, and assistant professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of Michigan.

Rami Toubia Stucky

Rami Toubia Stucky is a scholar of musical culture, civil rights, and equitable city life. His writings on the subject appear in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Popular Music Studies, Ethnomusicology, and Sound Studies. He is currently a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow working on a project that examines the intersection of music and civic expression in Washington, DC’s federal parks. Within this public-facing fellowship, Rami has written articles about the punk band Fugazi for NPS.gov, recorded a digital lecture on go-go venues for the Society for American Music’s Digital Lecture Series, and contributed an article on non-profit arts programming for the Park Stewardship Forum. In addition, he has designed zines, rack cards, posters, maps, and brochures about music in DC that he hands out at park events across the district.  

Erin Fulton

Erin Fulton serves as the music bibliographer and associate editor for the Sounding Spirit research lab. Fulton is a PhD candidate in musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Kentucky, having received her BM in musicology from the University of Kansas. In addition to university teaching, Fulton has worked as a music library paraprofessional for the University of Kentucky library system, Fort Hays State University, and the Sacred Harp Publishing Company. Her own research focuses on Anglo- and German-American sacred music of the nineteenth century U.S. with particular attention to book history, regional identity, performance spaces, and lived religion. She is a former Society for American Music Student Forum co‑chair. Fulton was the 2018 American Congregationalist Association–Boston Athenæum fellow, received the best-of-chapter award for her presentation at the 2020 Music Library Association Conference, Southeast, and is a multiple-time awardee of UK School of Music's Longyear and MacAdam prizes.

Chase Castle

​Chase Castle is a cultural historian of music. He is currently a Robert M. Kingdon Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research concerns the social lives of music: how it plays out in ordinary experiences, transforms across space and time, and contains sensational power. Castle specializes in nineteenth-century American religious music. His current book project, The Gospel in Black and White: Race and Popular Culture in American Hymns, uncovers African American and white contributions to gospel music between 1875 and 1915. Unlike previous scholarship that often segregates Black from white histories and treats African American music primarily in terms of spirituals, his research casts a wider net to consider how racial politics played out in pervasive vernacular music practices. Castle received a PhD in Music from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024. He is also an active organist and choral conductor

Samantha Cooper

​Samantha Cooper is the Robert M. Beren Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas. Her first book, American Jews and the Making of the New York Opera Industry, 1880-1940, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Her research has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music, American Jewish History, and The Opera Quarterly. Samantha is the producer and host of The Sounding Jewish Podcast, and the co-executive director of the Jewish Music Forum, A Project of the American Society for Jewish Music.

Cody A. Nordling

​Cody A. Nordling is Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at West Virginia University and is a scholar of American musical life in the long-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. He holds a PhD from the University of Iowa, and his primary research area explores the varied performance contexts and repertoires that once characterized the nation’s operatic cultures, portions of which can be found in journals and volumes in the fields of music and history. Norling takes particular interest in local and regional perspectives, however, and he is currently co-editing a volume on midwestern musical identities for Indiana University Press while also turning this attention to musical life in his new Appalachian home. An active member of SAM, Norling currently serves on its Education Committee and 2027 Local Arrangements Committee, and he is serving out a term as president of the American Musicological Society’s NYSSL Chapter.

Katelyn E. Best

​Katelyn E. Best is a Teaching Assistant Professor and Area Coordinator of Musicology at West Virginia University. Her research explores music in Deaf culture, hip hop, sound studies, musical movements, and cultural activism. She co-edited At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice, which was awarded the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize for Outstanding Edited Collection of Essays in Ethnomusicology and received an honorable mention for the Bruno Nettl Prize for an Outstanding Publication in the History of Ethnomusicology. Her current work traces the development of dip hop (sign language rap) in the United States and examines socio-cultural mechanisms that have historically colonized deaf experiences of music. While separate from her scholarly research, she has participated local Sacred Harp singing groups in Tallahassee, Florida and Morgantown, West Virginia and studied Appalachian singing traditions in an informal capacity with Ginny Hawker.

Marian Wilson Kimber

Marian Wilson Kimber is Professor of Musicology at the University of Iowa and incoming editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music. Her publications have treated Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Hensel, and women’s musical activities. Wilson Kimber’s 2017 book, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word, won SAM’s H. Earle Johnson Subvention. Her recent publications include articles about women’s peace songs for Eleanor Roosevelt in Music & Politics and the construction of Dvořák mythology in Annals of Iowa, as well as a chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Amy Beach. Wilson Kimber’s book about the roles of clubwomen activists in shaping American music is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. She also writes for the blog, Women’s Song Forum. As a spoken word performer, Wilson Kimber has performed pieces by women composers with the duo, Red Vespa, and with Iowa Percussion.

Elizabeth T. Craft

Elizabeth T. Craft is Associate Professor at the University of Utah and author of the book Yankee Doodle Dandy: George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage (Oxford University Press, 2024), which examines how Cohan shaped the burgeoning genre of musical comedy, the institution of Broadway, and the American cultural landscape in the early twentieth century. Her scholarship on musical theater and music in the United States also appears in journals and volumes including Studies in Musical Theatre, American Music, The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical, and the Oxford Handbooks of Arrangement Studies and Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations. Deeply committed to public scholarship, she has presented at in live and online venues in partnership with organizations including La Mirada Theatre, the Village Preservation Society, and the Broadway Nation podcast. 

Kendall Hatch Winter

Kendall Hatch Winter is Assistant Professor of Musicology in the School of Music at the University of Kentucky (UK). She researches music in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American politics and social movements, with emphasis on musical efforts to engage and enfranchise voters. Secondarily, her interests lie in music history pedagogy, music by women, and ludomusicology. Her publications have appeared in the Cambridge Opera Journal and Musicology Now. In the classroom, Kendall embraces TiLT (transparency in learning and teaching) pedagogy, active learning techniques, and the pedagogy of play. Beyond the classroom, her facilitative mentorship style prioritizes career exploration and professionalization through building transferrable skills.

Esther M. Morgan-Ellis

Esther M. Morgan-Ellis is professor of music history at the University of North Georgia, where she also coaches the old-time string band. She researches participatory music-making practices of the past and present. Her work on the US community singing movement can be found in her monograph, Everybody Sing! Community Singing in the American Picture Palace (2018), and in a wide range of musicological journals. She has also written about the learning habits of old-time musicians and online singing practices developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Community Singing (2024) and editor of Navigating Stylistic Boundaries in the Music History Classroom: Crossover, Exchange, Appropriation (Routledge, 2024), which won the 2025 AMS Teaching Award from the American Musicological Society.

Ashley R. Wheat

Ashley R. Wheat joined the Alabama Blues Project as Executive Director in 2019 because of the joy she found in her own experiences in music education.  From 6th grade through college, she played clarinet in school bands and became enamored with instrumental music.  As a life member of Tau Beta Sigma National Honorary Band Sorority, Inc., Ashley strives to carry out the sorority’s mission to “cultivate leadership, educational achievement, music appreciation and community development.”

Ashley holds an MBA from the University of Phoenix and a BS in Business Administration from Stillman College.  She served as 2022 Chair of the Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama’s Nonprofit Council and Tuscaloosa Co-Chair for “The pARTners Project”, a collective impact initiative supported by the National Endowment for the Arts to increase access to arts education for students in West-Central Alabama.  Ashley is also a 2023 graduate of Leadership Tuscaloosa.

Emmie Head

Emmie Head (she/her) is a PhD student in UCLA’s Department of Musicology. She holds a B.A. in music from St. Olaf College and an M.A. in musicology from UCLA. Emmie’s recent academic work has focused on the ways in which intellectual property policy and developing music technologies like AI challenge and complicate conceptions of musical ownership. Emmie’s dissertation project is poised to exist at the intersection of US intellectual property policy, artificial intelligence, and music making — asking how it is that regulatory powers such as the law or corporations directly impact the musical ecosystems of the country. Emmie has presented her work at the AMS – Midwest chapter, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Music and the Moving Image, and the First International Conference on the Study of Music and AI in Stockholm. In addition to her work as a musicologist, Emmie teaches flute lessons on a volunteer basis to increase access to quality instrumental music education for those who are underserved in classical music communities. When not musicking, Emmie can be found baking pastries for her big Greek family or hanging with her miniature dachshunds Mr. Peabody, Dobby, and Fig Newton.

Michele Yamamoto

Michele Yamamoto (she/her) is both a musicology scholar and a human-focused administrator within mission-driven organizations. Her research interests include the role of popular music in the development of self-identity, cultural identity, and other conceptual social frameworks. She is especially interested in arts justice and the way music and sounds enter and evolve within marginalized communities. Other research interests include politics, human geography, music and space/place, and sound studies. She holds an MA in musicology from California State University, Long Beach (2022) and a BA in Music History from UCLA (2009).

Kristy Swift

Kristy Swift is Assistant Professor of Music Studies at the University of Cincinnati (UC). She is a musicologist and organist studying sound, music, and trauma, historiography, opera, musicology pedagogy, and music and moving images.

Melissa Godoy

Melissa Godoy, University of Cincinnati instructor of Media Studies, is a producer of documentaries focused on arts, education, and health.

Julian Duncan

Julian Duncan is a doctoral candidate in musicology at Florida State University. His dissertation examines military and municipal bands in Puerto Rico during the early twentieth century, exploring how civic music-making responded to U.S. colonial influence while cultivating a distinct national repertoire. Beyond academia, Julian is a public folklorist for the State of Florida, where he administers the Veterans’ History Program, documenting the lives and traditions of Florida’s service members. He also serves as a keyboardist with the 116th Army Band of the Georgia Army National Guard, performing for military and government functions locally and abroad, including cultural exchange performances at the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi and at the Gori Defense Academy in the Republic of Georgia. His dual perspectives as scholar and Soldier inform his work on music, identity, and diplomacy within the broader history of American and Caribbean military ensembles.

Megan Murph

Megan Murph is the Director of the Budds Center for American Music Studies and an Instructor of Musicology at the University of Missouri. Some of her course topics include Music of the United States, Missouri Music, Approaches to Ecomusicology,  Women in Music, Global Popular Music Traditions, African American Music, Graduate Research Methods in Music, and Mindfulness for Musicians. As the Director of the Budds Center, Megan organizes programs around American/Missouri Music topics, oversees publications and recording projects, maintains the center’s collection and archive, and manages the endowment and grant application process. Her upcoming book, Experiencing Sound and Environment in the Works of Max Neuhaus (Routledge) explores the life and career of experimental percussionists and sound artist, Max Neuhaus. Megan is a faculty member of the "Hearing Place" faculty research group via the Center for Humanities (2025-2027) at MU where she also co-facilitates the "Mindfulness in Teaching" Community of Practice at the university's Teaching for Learning Center. 

Christopher J. Smith

Christopher J. Smith is Professor of Musicology and founding director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University, where he teaches courses in American, vernacular, and 20th century musics, and directs the Tech Folk Orchestra. His research interests are in American and African-American Music, 20th Century Music, oral-tradition music and dance idioms, improvisation, music and politics, and performance practice. He is the author of over 40 essays and book chapters, in addition to over 190 keynotes, talks, and peer-reviewed presentations. His award-winning monographs are The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (Illinois, 2013) and Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (Illinois, 2019). His next books are The Teacher’s Guide to Arts Practice Research in the College Classroom (with Rina Kundu Little), and Situational Genius: The Practice of the American Bandleaders (Illinois, 2027). He serves as Series Editor for the VMC/SUNY Press list Essays in Vernacular Music.

Adolfo Estrada

Adolfo Estrada is an Assistant Professor of Music and Assistant Director at Tarleton State University. As a Latin American music specialist, Adolfo’s work centers on the music of Mexico. He has received numerous invitations to perform as a guitarist and vocalist for concerts and studio recording sessions with professional mariachi ensembles in Mexico and the United States. Notable performances include the 2013 Inaugural Ceremonies for the U.S. President in Washington D.C., the performance of the Houston Grand Opera’s commissioned work “Cruzar La Cara De La Luna,” the 2015 world premiere of the Chicago Lyric mariachi opera “El Pasado Nunca Se Termina,” and appearances on the Tonight Show and the Stephen Colbert Show. Professional mariachi accompaniment of note includes Plácido Domingo and Vikki Carr. In 2010, he had the opportunity to perform with “The Best Mariachi in the World,” Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, for a significant concert performance.

James Revell Carr

James Revell Carr, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Musicology and director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American music, studies the importance of travel and commerce in the development of hybrid music and dance cultures. His major interests include sea chanteys, Anglo-American balladry, Hawaiian music, 19th century popular music and 20th century folk-rock. Carr's first book, Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrels (University of Illinois Press, 2014), about the musical exchange between American sailors and Hawaiian musicians in the nineteenth century, was a co-recipient of the Society of Ethnomusicology’s Alan P. Merriam Prize for outstanding book in ethnomusicology for 2015. Carr has articles and reviews in the Journal of American Folklore, The Yearbook for Traditional Music, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History, The Journal of British Studies, American Historical Review and others.

Scott W. Schwartz

Scott W. Schwartz is the Director and Archivist for Music and Fine Arts for the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also Associate Professor of Library Administration and teaches courses in archives administration, archival arrangement and description, and cultural heritage through the University’s Graduate School for Library and Information Science. Since his arrival at the University of Illinois, he has played the lead role in the development of a research center for America’s music and has been responsible for the re-energizing of a national celebration, American Music Month, which recognizes the contributions made by musicians, educators, archivists, librarians, and curators to preserve America’s diverse musical heritage.  In 2022 he was recognized by the American Bandmasters Association with the Edwin Franko Goldman Citation award for his contributions to the preservation of America’s wind band traditions.

Panayotis (Paddy) League

Panayotis (Paddy) League is a musicologist, composer, and performer specializing in the traditional and contemporary music and oral poetry of Greece, Northeast Brazil, Ireland, and their diasporas. He holds the PhD in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University, where he also served as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature and as an associate of the Center for Hellenic Studies. He currently serves as Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Director of the Center for Music of the Americas at Florida State University. His first monograph, Echoes of the Great Catastrophe: Re-Sounding Anatolian Greekness in Diaspora, was published in 2021 by University of Michigan Press, and his research has been recognized with honors from the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Modern Greek Studies Association, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for American Music. He is currently co-authoring a, ethnography of the Greek American folk dance revival with anthropologist Anastasia Panagakos and essayist Joanna Eleftheriou, and his born-digital critical edition of instrumental accordion music from the state of Paraíba in Northeast Brazil, That Calixto Sound, is set to launch in 2026. 

Katherine K. Preston

Katherine K. Preston, David N. & Margaret C. Bottoms Professor of Music Emerita, College of William & Mary, and Chair of the FAMI Committee. Preston is an expert on musical culture in 19th-century America, especially musical theatre and opera, the work of journeymen musicians, and the composer George Frederick Bristow. Her four monographs include two path-breaking books on the history of opera performance in 19th-century America and a biography of Bristow; she has also edited or co-edited four volumes of music, including two of Bristow’s symphonies. She is Past-President of the Society for American Music. 

Michael Sy Uy

Michael Sy Uy (he/him) is associate professor of musicology and director of the American Music Research Center. His main areas of scholarly research are on philanthropy, patronage, arts education, cultural policy, expertise and connoisseurship. His first book—Ask the Experts: How Ford, Rockefeller, and the NEA Changed American Music—was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. He is currently finishing his second book—Endowing Equity: The NEA, Cultural Diversity, and the Battle for Arts Funding—which has been supported by an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship. He is co-editor of the volume Musical Capital: Sound and Power in Washington, D.C. (Dumbarton Oaks: Harvard University Press, 2026) and co-series editor of Arts in Context: Critical Performance Infrastructures (University of Texas Press). His other published work appears in American Music, Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of Musicology, and Music and Arts in Action. 

Neely Bruce

Neely Bruce, John Spencer Camp Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. Bruce is a prolific composer, an accomplished conductor and pianist, and a scholar of American music. He self-consciously identifies as an American composer. His most performed work is a setting of the Bill of Rights for chorus and chamber orchestra. He has also set the three Reconstruction Amendments and the Nineteenth Amendment (women's suffrage) to music, and his first full-length opera is an allegory of the American Revolution. He recorded Bristow’s “Andante et Polonaise” for Vox in 1972 and produced the only 20th century performances of Bristow’s opera Rip Van Winkle at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1974.

Kevin Scott

Kevin Scott is a composer and conductor currently residing in Hudson Falls, New York who has appeared
with numerous orchestras as an untiring advocate of new, unknown or unjustly neglected composers and has also been invited to several universities and music societies as a guest lecturer to talk about orchestral repertoire and new composers. His contributions include his working relationships with scores of scholars, conductors, and performers who are interested in working on the project and interest in organizing events.

Barbara Haws

Archivist and Historian Emerita of the New York Philharmonic. For 33 years, she championed making the history of the Orchestra easily accessible to a broader public by curating exhibitions, producing award-winning historic recordings and developing the Shelby White and Leon Levy Digital Archives, which includes the largest online performance database in the world. Following her retirement, she attended the University of Oxford, receiving her DPhil in 2023. Her doctoral dissertation, “The Making of an American Orchestra: U.C. Hill and the Philharmonic in New York, 1815-1848,” focuses on New York’s music community.

Kyle Gann

Kyle Gann, Taylor Hawver and Frances Bortle Hawver Professor of Music at Bard College. Gann is a composer and musicologist at Bard College of Music and brings expertise on American music and wide connections with scholars and composers. He is the author of seven books on American composers and related topics, and the editor of the modern editions of George Bristow’s Fourth Symphony.

Sarah Hachtman

Sarah Hachtman is a DMA candidate in vocal performance at the University of Iowa. She earned her Master of Arts in voice from the University of Iowa and holds a BA in music from Brigham Young University. Audiences have enjoyed her performances in Brahms’s German Requiem, Handel’s Messiah, Mozart’s Così fan tutte, and William Menefield’s opera,Fierce. Hachtman specializes in music associated with Jane Austen and frequently presents lecture-recitals of music from Austen movie adaptations. In 2025, she was featured in “Jane and Her Music,” hosted at Iowa’s Old Capitol Museum, and at the Jane Austen Festival at Cincinnati’s Heritage Village Museum.

Douglas W. Shadle

Douglas W. Shadle, an Associate Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University, is a scholar of orchestras and orchestral music in the United States. A two-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, Shadle is the author of two books, Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford, 2016) and Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony (Oxford, 2021). He regularly consults on audience engagement projects for orchestras around the world.

John Graziano

John Graziano, Professor Emeritus of Music History and Director of the Music in Gotham Project at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Graziano is an expert on nineteenth-century American music history and has published widely on that topic.

Kathryn Miller Haines

Kathryn Miller Haines is an archivist and the head of the Center for American Music, part of the University of Pittsburgh’s Library System. She is the curator of Stephen Foster Collection and the University’s Jazz archives including the collections of Sam Rivers, Ahmad Jamal, Erroll Garner, Bill Cole, Dave Burrell, and Joe Negri as well as the jazz-inspired art of Jeff Schlanger. She works closely with Pitt’s Jazz Studies department, regularly gives presentations on the jazz archives, and curates digital and analog exhibits on the collections’ holdings. She is one of the co-authors of Voices Across Time, a k-12 curriculum support guide for teachers of all disciplines who wish to use historic American Music in their classroom and has co-run five NEH Summer Institutes for teachers on the topic. She has also served as PI for three NEH Landmarks of History workshops (including one forthcoming in Summer 2026). In addition to her archival work and research, she provides primary source instruction for a wide variety of graduate and undergraduate courses in music, history, and English. She has an MFA in writing from the University of Pittsburgh and is a mystery writer whose work has been published by HarperCollins, MacMillan, and Simon & Schuster. 

Heidi Marshall

Heidi Marshall, Head of Archives & Special Collections at Columbia College Chicago, manages two campus units: College Archives & Special Collections and the Center for Black Music Research (CBMR). The CBMR collections highlight the role of Black music in world culture with materials representing Black music from the United States, Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and Latin America, in a variety of formats. Holdings in Special Collections include composer collections originating from the college Music program and materials in support the Musical Composition for the Screen graduate program.  Marshall also manages the institutional digital repository and records retention activities, and serves on the college library management team. She developed a primary  materials research course, co-teaches courses in oral history, communication, cultural studies, and history, and lectures in classes across the curriculum. She has served on regional and state organizations and has consulted with non-profit organizations, government agencies, and other repositories. She holds an MA in History and an MS in Library & Information Science from Simmons University, Boston, MA.

Agustina Checa

Agustina Checa (she/her/ella) is Assistant Professor of music at Lehman College and doctoral faculty in the Ethnomusicology program at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Also at CUNY, Checa is the director of the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music and editor of its annual publication American Music Review. Directing HISAM, she pushes for diversifying the study of American music by promoting cutting-edge scholarship and organizing public events. Checa is an ethnomusicologist working at the intersection of popular music and media studies researching music technologies, material culture, value, and the infrastructures that sustain independent music in South America. Her book project builds on a decade-long involvement with independent labels that produce and circulate cassette tapes across Argentina.  Indebted to the values of public education, most of her writing can be found in open access platforms. Checa is the creator and director of Magnetismo Sónico, an accoladed online archive that showcases the work of cassette labels in Latin America and aims to foster connections between tape makers and enthusiasts. She has been a participant of indie music scenes for more than a decade, mostly in her capacity as a journalist and music critic for various outlets of indie music and culture in Latin America, such as Indiehoy, Revista Maple and Deodoro magazine. Today most of her non-academic writing and music-making is on alternative rock and shoegaze. 

Mark Clague

Mark Clague, PhD is Director of the American Music Institute at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater & Dance, which houses two critical editions of music: Music of the United States of America (MUSA), published by A-R Editions on behalf of the American Musicological Society, and The George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition, published by Schott Music, as part of the University of Michigan’s Gershwin Initiative. Clague serves as Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan with affiliate appointments in American Culture, Afro-American Studies, and Arts Entrepreneurship and Leadership. His research centers on music’s role in forging community in the United States and addresses topics from musical institutions to American patriotism. His book O Say Can You Hear?: A Cultural Biography of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (WW Norton, 2022) was selected as an Editor’s Pick by the New York Times, and his two editions of George Gershwin’s An American in Paris (Final and Uncut) were recently published by Schott Music (2025). His article “From Portfolio to Platform Career: Navigating the Promise and Pitfalls of a Sustainable and Meaningful Life in the Performing Arts” offers mentoring advice to music graduates seeking to create or augment their own career opportunities. A graduate of both the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, Clague currently leads the University of Michigan’s campus-wide Arts Initiative. His anthem research is featured on the website StarSpangledMusic.org and he posts on social media as @usmusicscholar.

Kerry Cullinan

Kerry Cullinan is an independent researcher who serves as director/coordinator of the Vermont Early Music Project. Most recently, he co-curated the exhibit "Vermont's Tunebook Tradition: Composers, Compilers & Singers of Psalmody (1790-2025)" which is currently on display at the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier.