People
SAM250 Committee/Presenter
Dana Gorzelany-Mostak
Dana Gorzelany-Mostak is a Professor of Music at Georgia College & State University and Interim Executive Director of the Society for American Music. 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.
SAM250 Committee/Presenter
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.
SAM250 Committee
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.
SAM250 Committee
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.
SAM250 Committee
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.
SAM250 Committee
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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
Presenter
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.
Presenter
Cody A. Norling
Cody A. Norling 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.
Presenter
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.
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Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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).
Presenter
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.
Presenter
Melissa Godoy
Melissa is Managing Producer of CCM Recording Productions, where she co-creates music performance videos, promos, and short documentaries with a talented student crew. “Cincinnati Sounds: Exploring a Musical City’s Spaces, Places, and Sounds” was co-produced with this energetic team and with the Cincinnati Sounds site-based research project, led by Dr. Kristy Swift, Assistant Professor of Music Studies at CCM. Godoy is the winner of three regional Emmy Awards. She was the line producer for the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary feature “American Factory” (Netflix) by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert and its prequel, Oscar-nominated “The Last Truck” (HBO). Her directing credits include a documentary about creative aging, “Do Not Go Gently," narrated by Walter Cronkite and featuring the godfather of modern music, Leo Ornstein, which aired on PBS stations for 12 years through American Public Television. She now teaches the Production Master Class and the Fun(damentals) of Story at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
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Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
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.
Presenter
Ginny Hawker
Ginny Hawker was born to sing growing up in rural Virginia in a large musical family. Starting with the unaccompanied singing of her grandfather’s Primitive Baptist church, she knew that lyrics, the poetry, of a song, are important. You hear that when Ginny sings. As she grew up, Ginny learned harmony through early Bluegrass and southern Gospel singing with her Dad and her cousins. The blend of voices singing together pulled her ear enabling her to teach harmony singing by ear at music camps in the US, Canada, and the British Isles for over 30 years. But the ancient sounds she first heard never left her heart, and today it still touches strangers’ hearts who have never been inside a Primitive Baptist church. In reviewing Hawker’s latest solo recording, R. A. Ewing states, “from the ether the voices of Edith Piaf, Bessie Smith, and Mahalia Jackson; meld them all into one glorious voice…and there you have Ginny Hawker.”
Presenter
Grace M. Alexander
Grace M. Alexander is an American violinist, collaborator, musical leader, arts administrator, photographer, and forest conservationist. Currently based in Vancouver, BC Canada, she is passionate about creating thoughtful, musical, and creative experiences for people of all backgrounds and interests. Growing up between Santa Monica, CA and Plains, MT, nature has always been a centerpiece of her creative inspiration. Grace aims to integrate the natural world into all artistic avenues of her life. In addition to her career as an artist, she continues the work alongside her family in rural forest health, conservation, and habitat management in Northwest Montana, U.S.A.
Presenter
Will Rand
Will Rand is a creative visionary who is passionate about spiritual wholeness, social justice, ecological wellness, and building new communal practices of healing in our world. Will has facilitated storytelling festivals where people shared stories of their lives, concerts cultivating a multiplicity of creative disciplines, and communal gathering spaces where people come to heal and be spiritually renewed.
As the founder of EarthStory, a project that convenes community in the pursuit of ecological wholeness, Will draws together creatives, storytellers, and community members to remember their stories of belonging as a part of the biotic community. Will is currently the Music Director of the Seattle Peace Chorus. As a collaborative pianist, composer, and conductor, he has created music with others around the world. Will has served local churches as a Minister of Worship Arts in Seattle, Washington, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Toledo, Ohio.
Presenter
Nate Ruechel
Nate Ruechel [REEK-ul] is a cultural historian specializing in migration, mass media, and the performance of identity in the United States. He received a PhD in musicology from Florida State University in 2022 and currently is an assistant professor at the College of Southern Idaho in Twin Falls where he teaches academic transfer courses in music and ancient and modern humanities. Nate has consulted with the Idaho State Department of Education on curricular reforms for elementary general music, collaborating with K-12
educators to devise new standards of instruction. He has been involved with the Society for American Music since 2018, attending and presenting at national conferences and working with interest groups.
Presenter
Elissa Harbert
Elissa Harbert is an Associate Professor of Music at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, where she teaches a wide variety of musicology courses. Her research focuses on historical representation in musical theater. Research for her first book, History Musicals and the Challenges of Presenting the Past on Broadway, was supported by the Society for American Music’s Virgil Thomson Fellowship and DePauw University. She earned her PhD from Northwestern University, where she was awarded the American Musicological Society’s Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship and was a finalist for the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award. She has published articles on history musicals including 1776 and Hamilton in American Music and Studies in Musical Theatre as well as several edited collections. Harbert previously worked as an instructor at Northwestern University and a post-doctoral fellow at Macalester College.
Presenter
Janani Sridhar
Raved as having the “loveliest of voices,” Singaporean soprano Janani Sridhar is well known for her interpretation of operatic heroines. Equally at home in concert repertoire, Dr. Sridhar’s orchestral engagements include collaborations with orchestras across America and Asia. A passionate proponent of contemporary music, Dr. Sridhar has premiered works by American and Singaporean composers, and has had the honor of working with composers Jake Heggie, Libby Larsen, Evan Mack, and Tom Cipullo. Sought after as a pedagogue, Dr. Sridhar’s previous faculty appointments include Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Centenary College of Louisiana. She currently serves as the Voice Area Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Voice at DePauw University. Some of Dr. Sridhar’s recent season performances include: her return to Carnegie Hall in Mozart’s Requiem, Charpentier’s Te Deum, and Mother in Amahl and the Night Visitors with Opera Today! www.JananiSridhar.com
Presenter
Birgitta J. Johnson
Birgitta J. Johnson teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in world music, African American music, African music and ethnomusicology. She received her Bachelors of Arts in Music from Agnes Scott College where she played piano (major), violin (principal second), Ghanaian drums and sang in Joyful Noise (gospel choir). Johnson received her Masters and Doctorate degrees in Ethnomusicology from the University of California, Los Angeles where she worked with Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, Cheryl L. Keyes and Francisco Aguabella in African American and African music and Afro-Cuban music, drumming, and dance. She has served as a lecturer at the University of California, Pomona College, Pitzer College and Scripps College and as a postdoctoral fellow in ethnomusicology at Syracuse University teaching courses African American sacred music, African music, the blues, hip-hop, and world music. Her research and teaching areas of interests include African American and African music; music and worship in African American churches; musical change and identity in Black popular music; music in African American megachurches, sacred music in the African diaspora, and community archiving.
Presenter
John Spilker-Beed
John Spilker-Beed is Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of the Gender & Sexuality Studies program at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He has presented scholarship at the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, Society for Music Theory, and the Association of American Colleges & Universities. His publications appear in American Music, the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and the book Teaching Difficult Topics: Reflections from the Undergraduate Music Classroom (University of Michigan Press, 2024.) Dr. Spilker-Beed’s book, co- authored with Colleen Renihan and Trudi Wright, is titled Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music (University of Illinois Press, 2024).
Presenter
Trudi Wright
Trudi Wright is a Professor at Regis University where she investigates Musical Theater History, American Music, and World Music with her students. Her experiences as a college educator led her to write the co-edited essay collection Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music (University of Illinois Press, 2024). She is also the co-editor of Open Access Musicology, a peer and student reviewed journal intended for undergraduate music students and has published scholarship on musical theater and labor in sources like American Music and Studies in Musical Theatre. She lives and works in Denver, Colorado with collaboration at the center of all her endeavors.
Presenter
Rory Creigh
Rory Creigh is Vice President of Education at Practicing Musician, an online music education company, and an active performer. He holds a doctorate in Musicology with a specialization in early music from Florida State University and graduate degrees from Western Washington University. His research spans The Beatles, representation and difference in opera, and artificial intelligence in music education. He has published in the SAM Bulletin, the Mozart Society of America newsletter, and the journal Weberiana, and has and will present at regional and international conferences, including at the upcoming bicentennial commemoration of Carl Maria von Weber's death in Dresden, Germany. He is currently preparing a critical edition of an opera by Georg Joseph Vogler. Dr. Creigh is collaborating with pianist Lara Downes and twelve scholars of American music, including J. Peter Burkholder, on a free multimedia course teaching American history through music for elementary, middle, and high school students.
Presenter
Melody Puller
A native of Waterloo, IA, Melody Puller spent her formative years around Sandpoint, ID, where she studied piano with Colleen Hunter and Debby O'Dell. She earned her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in piano pedagogy and performance from University of Idaho under the direction of Jay Mauchley. Puller was a resident of Burlington, VT, for 13 years, where she continued her studies with Elaine Greenfield. While in Vermont, she was artistic director and frequent soloist for the Cathedral Arts series at St. Paul's Cathedral in Burlington and performed annually in John O'Conor's master classes at Adamant Music School. Puller is acclaimed for her creative programming, including the complete Debussy Preludes, Chopin Preludes, Bach Inventions, and Schumann Fantasiestücke, pairings of Philip Glass Etudes with Rameau character pieces, and music & literature programs for Spokane Public Radio. She currently resides in Spirit Lake, ID, and is chair of the piano department at Music Conservatory of Sandpoint.
Presenter
Matthew Goodrich
A native of Syracuse, NY, Matthew Goodrich studied piano with Julian Martin at Oberlin College Conservatory and earned his DMA from the University of Washington under Robin McCabe, completing a dissertation on pianist Ricardo Viñes and the artistic circle Les Apaches. As soloist he has performed throughout the United States and has also appeared with orchestras including the Syracuse Symphony, University of Washington Symphony, Seattle Thalia Orchestra, Willamette Valley Symphony, and Coeur d'Alene Symphony.
His performance career spans the concert hall and theatrical stage, encompassing more than 100 productions including five pre-Broadway premieres, seven seasons as company pianist-conductor at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and the national tour of If/Then. He was recognized as Best Music Director in the 2023 BroadwayWorld Seattle Awards. His collaborative work includes long-standing relationships with Pacific Northwest Ballet and Northwest Boychoir as well as touring partnerships with Expanse Ensemble and Harrington-Goodrich Duo. Formerly on the faculties of Oregon State University and Southern Oregon University, Goodrich is Director of Performance at Music Conservatory of Sandpoint.
Presenter
Everette Scott Smith
Everette Scott Smith is a Professor of Music at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he teaches applied oboe and seminars in music history and research. A performer–scholar, his primary research examines John Cage, ecocriticism, and intersections between twentieth-century avant-garde music and visual art. He has published works with The University of Michigan Press and in journals American Music and the Journal of the Society for American Music (JSAM). He has presented research both nationally and internationally at the annual meetings of The American Musicological Society, The Society for American Music, ReVIEWING Black Mountain College, The American Comparative Literature Society, Music and the Moving Image Conference, and in lecture at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida. As an oboist he has performed across the United States, Europe, and Latin America.
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Presenter
Emily Ruth Allen
Emily Ruth Allen is an instructor at the University of South Carolina in the School of Music and Institute for Southern Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Musicology from Florida State University. She is working on a book manuscript about Carnival parade musics in Mobile, Alabama, inspired by her experiences marching in the parades during her high school and college years. Her other interests lie in scholarly podcasting, which she currently pursues as a host for two podcasts, the New Books Network and Take on the South.
Presenter
Alexandra Kori Hill
Alexandra Kori Hill, 2025-2026 Provostal Post-Doctoral Fellow in Musicology at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music who is the current chair of the Cincinnati Symphony’s Multi-Cultural Awareness Council, serves as assistant editor and communications associate for I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, the in-house publication of American Composers Forum, and whose first book, The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price, is out now from Cambridge University Press.
Presenter
Yemi Oyediran
Yemi Oyediran a Nigerian American filmmaker, music producer, and educator whose work spans interdisciplinary research with a focus on preserving and reexamining the cultural foundations of American music.
Presenter
Davison Black
Davison Black is a recent graduate of the Media Production program at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. Davison contributed to an Ohio Valley Emmy Award-winning short documentary, "The Making of Sweet Charity." He was on the camera crew for the "Cincinnati Sounds" documentary, and then he took the lead as Editor. Davison also cleared rights for the extensive archival photos and footage used and earned a co-producer credit in the film.
Presenter
Joshua Adewole Kerobo
Joshua Adewole Kerobo, a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, studying sociopolitical implications of Black Atlantic music cultures among youth communities, Black music development in Cincinnati, and African popular music
Presenter
Ethan Uslan
Hailed by the Chicago Tribune for his "vivid musical imagination" and "deep understanding of far-flung performance practices," Ethan Uslan is a ragtime/jazz concert pianist. He is a 3-time winner of the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest (yes - that really exists!) and has performed all over the USA and Europe. Ethan was featured prominently in the 2012 documentary "The Entertainers" and his jazz rendition of Bach's "Minuet in G" was used in the AMC series Interview With the Vampire.
Uslan currently lives in Charlotte, North Carolina where he presents his music and storytelling on his very own podcast - The Carolina Shout. His concerts are filled with passion, humor, virtuosity, and a deep love for America's rich musical past. His vast repertoire includes original arrangements of New Orleans Jazz, blues, stomps, Harlem stride piano, swing, Cuban rumbas, jazzed-up versions of classical masterpieces, and even a polka or two.
Presenter
Ryan Raul Bañagale
Ryan Raul Bañagale is Professor of Music at Colorado College, where he also serves as Director of the Crown Center for Teaching. His research focuses on American music and arrangement studies, especially the ways familiar works change meaning as they move across time and space. He is the author of Arranging Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue and the Creation of an American Icon (Oxford, 2014) and co-editor of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: Billy Joel and Popular Music Studies (Lexington, 2020). His critical edition of Gershwin’s 1924 Rhapsody in Blue was published in the George and Ira Gershwin Critical Edition. Bañagale has presented widely for scholarly and public audiences, including six previous pre-concert talks for Bravo! Vail.
Presenter
Eric R. Jackson
Dr. Eric R. Jackson is a professor of history and black studies in the Department of History and Geography at Northern Kentucky University, where he teaches courses in American and African American history/studies, race relations, and peace studies. He has over 50 publications, including articles in such journals as Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies, Journal of African American History, and Journal of World Peace.
Presenter
Tammy L. Kernodle
Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle is a University Distinguished Professor of Musicology at Miami University, specializing in African American music. She is the author of Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, and appeared in documentaries such as Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band and Miles Davis: The Birth of Cool. She regularly collaborates with institutions including NPR, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the BBC, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.