Committee
Graduate Students
Alejandrina M. Medina
Co-chair
(she/her/ella)
Alejandrina M. Medina is a PhD candidate in the Integrative Studies program and graduate specialization in Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. In addition to her work at UCSD, she co-leads the Black, Indigenous, and Trans of Color Histories Lab, which was awarded a $460,000 higher learning grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2024. Medina’s dissertation, “Latina Loudness: Transfeminine Excess in las Américas” draws from Marxian theories of alienation and aesthetic speculation to examine transfeminine performance in the US, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil; the project argues for loudness as an aesthetic category that sounds material histories of hemispheric racialized gender. Her dissertation research has been supported by the International Institute, Black Studies Project, Tyler Center for Global Studies, and Sarah Pettit Fellowship in Lesbian Studies at Yale University. Alejandrina’s writing can be found in Sonic Scope: A Journal of Audiovisual Culture, Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, NACLA: Report on the Americas, and forthcoming in Contemporary Music Review.
Photo by Xelestial Moreno-Luz
Jordan R. Brown
Co-chair
(she/her/hers)
Jordan R. Brown (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology and Presidential Scholar at Harvard University with a secondary field in African and African American Studies. Originally from Virginia Beach, Virginia, she obtained her bachelor of arts (B.A.) degree in both music and statistics from The University of Virginia and her master’s in ethnomusicology (M.M.) from Florida State University. She is currently chair of Harvard University’s Graduate Music Forum and a UNESCO Youth Ambassador for Peace and Intercultural Dialogue. Brown’s dissertation, tentatively titled “The Black Alternative: A Cultural and Musical Phenomenon” uses Black politics, Black feminist theory, and “quare” theory to investigate the word “alternative” as it is used on genres commercially coded as “Black,” specifically alternative R&B and alternative hip-hop; cultural theory is further implemented to examine how these hybrid genres serve as a refuge for intersectional minorities within the Black identity. Her work will be supported by the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute, where she will serve as the Dorothy Porter Fellow during the 2025–2026 academic year.
In addition to her scholarly interests, Brown also composes musical arrangements and performs and releases original songs under her pseudonym J-Renee. She identifies as a performer-scholar and intends to continue bridging the two practices in her future work. For more information, visit jordanrbrown.com.
Brian Veasna Sengdala
(he/they/theirs)
My name is Brian Veasna Sengdala and I'm a queer, Khmer and Lao American, disabled Ph.D. candidate in performance studies at Cornell University. With performance, sound, music, race, disability, land/mines, food, refugeehood, and queer of color futurities, I study how second-generation Khmer and Asian American artists imagine histories with traumatized archives through what I'm calling transgressive memory work. My article, "Cambodian American Listening as Memory Work" can be read through American Music and my article of refugee elder women as activists called "Speaking Empathy, Crafting Solidarity" is forthcoming in Women & Performance. I did previous doctoral work in ethnomusicology at Rutgers, and hold a dual M.M. in American and public musicology and choral studies in sacred music and a B.M. in voice performance from Westminster Choir College. I'm a Grammy-nominated choral musician having worked in and around the New York Metropolitan area and abroad, particularly as an artist-in-residence at the University of Oxford. Though the Department of Education, I have also served on the research committee to develop and publish for the Cambodian American Studies Model Curriculum in California—the first of its kind.
Renata Yazzie
(she/her/hers)
Renata Yazzie, Tó’aheedlíinii born for Kinyaa’áanii, is a Diné Ph.D student in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. She holds a Master of Music degree with dual concentrations in Musicology and Piano Performance and an undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the University of New Mexico.
Her current research interests are grounded in Diné perceptions, interactions and interpretations of sonic spaces across varied genres including classical music, Christian hymnody, Korean Pop, hip-hop, blues, and more. She is also involved with creating and implementing Indigenous-based music pedagogies for students K-12 and is the founder and director of the American Indian Musicians’ Scholarship which provides multi-faceted support for Native college students pursuing a degree in music. Overall, her academic and musical pursuits aim to improve music education in all realms for Indigenous students. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with family and friends, board games, and learning languages.
Balakrishnan Raghavan
(he/him)
Balakrishnan Raghavan is an accomplished musician, researcher, and educator. They are a doctoral candidate in Cross-Cultural Musicology with a designated emphasis in Feminist Studies and a Graduate Pedagogy Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Bala's work focuses on oral traditions of music across the Indian subcontinent, with an emphasis on politics, aesthetics, spirituality, sexuality, caste, and South Asian performing traditions. As a performer, Bala has toured extensively across India, the UK, and the USA, and as a scholar, he has presented regularly at the annual conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Association for Asian Studies, and the South Asia Conference in Madison, in addition to multiple university guest lectures. With over ten years of interdisciplinary performance experience, he attempts to re-imagine the many ways of looking at traditional music from India, centering the marginalized experience at the intersection of song, poetry, sexuality, and personal narrative.
Kimberley Watson
(she/her/hers)
Kimberley Watson (she/her) is a Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology and Folklore at Indiana University, Bloomington. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (B.F.A.) in Music from the University of Trinidad and Tobago, a Master of Music (M.M.) in Music Education from the University of Delaware, and a Master of Music (M.M.) in Ethnomusicology from Bowling Green State University. Her work explores Afro-spirituality and ancestrality within carnival, calypso, steelpan, and African-derived religious practices. Through this lens, she examines how African beliefs and practices within these cultural forms shape and reflect Trinbagonian epistemologies, asserting that these traditions permeate everyday life and defy separation from the mundane.
In addition to her research, Kimberley has experience teaching music to students with special needs and has compiled a resource book for teaching percussion and traditional Trinbagonian instruments to students with disabilities. An accomplished musician herself, Kimberley plays steelpan, clarinet, and percussion.
Lydia Bangura
(she/her/hers)
Lydia Bangura (she/her) is a singer and a doctoral candidate in music theory at the University of Michigan. She also holds a bachelor’s degree from Northern Arizona University and a master’s degree from Roosevelt University, both in vocal performance. Bangura was selected in 2022 as an associate artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, where she had the honor of studying with mentor artist Dr. Philip Ewell. She is the founder and host of the music research podcast series, Her Music Academia, and serves as the student representative on the executive committee for Music Theory Midwest. Her research interests include the intersection of performance and analysis, theory pedagogy, Black feminism/womanism in Black women’s music, and the life and collaborative works of Florence Price. Also a lifelong music performer, Bangura has experience studying violin, viola, and voice. Her recent operatic roles include Pamina and Second Lady in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Alcina in Handel’s Alcina, Amore in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, and the solo soprano in Judith Weir’s one woman show, King Harald's Saga.
Zehra Jabeen Shah
(she/her)
Zehra Jabeen Shah (she/her) is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at Harvard University. She has an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Mills College. Originally from Karachi, Pakistan, her research interests currently lie in South Asia with an interdisciplinary approach of critical organology, indigenous and spirituality studies, dance, music archeology and classical Indo-Pakistani music- particularly through the lens of women, gender and sexuality. She has professionally worked as an oral historian, collecting narratives relating to the 1947 Partition of British India, folk and classical music in Pakistan and the indigenous Kalasha community of the Kalash Dur valleys, and has worked for museums.
She is also undergoing training in the classical sarangi, and has a background in comparative literature, cultural studies and is a working poet.
Tiffany Ta
(she/her/hers)
Tiffany Ta is a PhD student in music theory at UC Santa Barbara with an emphasis in cognitive science. Her work sits at the nexus of music, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, where she studies resonance—how sound, identity, and memory move across bodies, cultures, and institutions. Her current projects include an invited chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Global Music Industry Studies, examining how K-pop resonates with the legacies of hip-hop’s Black American lineage—sonic, aesthetic, and political. She co-founded the Asian Classical Music Initiative and helps run the Rap & Hip-Hop Interest Group for SMT (yes, that’s a real thing). As a teacher and researcher, she builds quiet infrastructures that support learning, deepen access, and make space for offbeat rhythms and delayed resolutions. She lives between two frequencies: Kim Kardashian’s “I didn’t get this far just to get this far,” and Buckminster Fuller’s call to “build a new model that‘s so effective, it renders the old one obsolete.”
Graduate Student Committee Alumni
Laurie Lee
Alissandra (Lissa) Reed
Jeffrey C. Yelverton Jr.
Hyeonjin Park
Abigail Lindo
Carlo Aguilar González
Anna B. Gatdula
Gerry Lopez
Sinem Eylem Arslan
Hanisha Kulothparan
Affiliates
Ana Alonso Minutti
University of New Mexico
Ana Alonso Minutti (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor of Music, faculty affiliate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute, and research associate of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute at the University of New Mexico. She was born and raised in Puebla, Mexico, where she graduated summa cum laude from the Universidad de las Américas. She came to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Davis, where she obtained M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in musicology. Her work focuses on music traditions from Mexico, the U.S. Southwest, and Latin America, and her current scholarship engages with experimental expressions, Chicana feminisms, critical race theory, and decolonial methodologies.
Clifton Boyd*
New York University
Clifton Boyd (he/him) is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at New York University, where he will transition into his role as Assistant Professor of Music in 2024. He holds a Ph.D. in music theory from Yale University. His research explores themes of (racial) identity, politics, and social justice in 20th- and 21st-century American popular music. His current book project, Keep It Barbershop: Stylistic Preservation and Whiteness in the Barbershop Harmony Society, demonstrates how nostalgia-fueled efforts toward musical and cultural preservation can perpetuate racial injustice. Combining critical race studies and music theory, this work furnishes new understandings of whiteness, barbershop as a racialized musical practice, and vernacular music theory. His articles and essays appear or are forthcoming in Music Theory and Analysis, Music Theory Spectrum, Theory and Practice, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as the edited collections The Oxford Handbook for Public Music Theory and Being Black In The Ivory: Truth-Telling About Racism In Higher Education. His research has been supported by fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He led the founding of Project Spectrum in 2017, and served as chair from 2017–19 and co-chair from 2021–22.
Nalini Ghuman
Mills College
Nalini Ghuman (she/her/hers) is Professor of Music at Mills College in Oakland, CA, where she teaches courses on Indian music, women and gender, opera, and seminars on music and conflict, migration, orientalism, nationalism, and postcolonialism. Professor Ghuman was educated at The Queen’s College, Oxford (BA, first-class hons.) King’s College, London (MMus, distinction), and the University of California at Berkeley (PhD in musicology and ethnomusicology). Her book, Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2014), was selected as the BBC Music Magazine’s ‘Book of the Month’. Recent essays include ‘Maud MacCarthy: The Musicking Body’ in The Music Road. Coherence and Diversity in Music from the Mediterranean to India, ed. Reinhard Strohm, (The British Academy Proceedings, Themed Volumes, 2019), and ‘Elgar’s Pageant of Empire, 1924: An imperial leitmotif’, in Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of display and the British Empire (Manchester University Press, 2015).
Nadia Chana
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Nadia Chana (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at University of Wisconsin–Madison. She grew up in Edmonton/Amiskwaciwâskahikan singing in choirs (and everywhere else), a context that directly shapes her work, however invisibly. Nadia’s research focuses on climate crisis and relations among Indigenous activists, settlers, and nonhuman actors in Northern Alberta and the California Bay Area. Fuelled by the urgency of climate crisis, she asks: what can healthy relationships between humans and the more-than-human world––plants, animals, water, land––look and feel like? And what role do practices like listening, walking, and even singing play in transforming these relationships?
More generally, Nadia is interested in listening, healing, voice (both audible and metaphoric), embodiment, alternative epistemologies/practice-based ways of knowing, critical race and Indigenous studies, experimental and collaborative ethnography, and Bay Area spirituality.
Ellie M. Hisama
University of Toronto
Professor Ellie Hisama was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Music beginning July 2021. Professor Hisama joined the University of Toronto from the Department of Music at Columbia University, where she served as the Vice-Chair of the Department of Music, Music Theory Area Chair, and as Chair of the Academic Review Committee at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Professor Hisama recently served as a humanities representative on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on Equity and Diversity at Columbia. In recognition of her service, Professor Hisama was named as a Provost Leadership Fellow at Columbia and as an inaugural recipient of the Provost’s Faculty Mentoring Award for her work mentoring tenure-track and mid-career faculty.
Her publications engage with the work of BIPOC artists, women musicians and composers, and considerations of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality across classical and popular music. In 2020-21 she is co-director with Zosha Di Castri of a symposium, podcast series, and concert titled Unsung Stories: Women at Columbia's Computer Music Center, and is convenor of a spring 2021 panel addressing anti-Asian racism. In Fall 2020 she directed Isaac Julien's Looking for Langston at 30: A Screening and Roundtable Celebrating Queer Harlem and co-directed with Michael Heller Feed the Fire: A Cyber Symposium in Honor of Geri Allen. She has given named lectures, keynote and plenary addresses internationally. An alumna of Phillips Exeter Academy, her classroom teaching is rooted in Exeter’s Harkness Method of collaborative learning.
Amanda Hsieh
Durham University
Amanda Hsieh (she/they) is an Assistant Professor in Musicology at Durham University (UK). Their current book project, tentatively entitled ‘The Japanese Empire’s German Art Music: 1910–1945’, analyzes how a network of interconnected individuals across Germany, Japan, and Taiwan facilitated the integration of Western, specifically German, art music with the state- and empire-building efforts of Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. The 2020 winner of the Royal Musical Association (RMA)’s Jerome Roche Prize and the 2023 winner of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music’s Kurt Weill Prize, Amanda has published in Music & Letters, Cambridge Opera Journal, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (JRMA). She serves a five-year term (2021–25) as Reviews Editor of the JRMA and the RMA Research Chronicle. Before taking up her current post at Durham, Amanda was a Research Assistant Professor in Musicology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Before moving to East Asia, they worked as Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto, where they also obtained their PhD (2020).
Catrina Kim*
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Catrina Kim (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She earned her PhD in Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music in August 2020; she also holds an M.A. in Music Theory from Eastman and a B.A. in Piano Performance from the University of Houston. She has presented on early Romantic form and aesthetics as well as on issues in diversity, equity, and labor at regional and national music theory meetings; and her paper “Fragments and Frames in the Early Romantic Era” was a recipient of the Society for Music Theory’s inaugural Student Presentation Award (2019).
Catrina’s research gravitates toward the parameters that guide analysts to draw certain musical boundaries, the constitutive impact of these boundaries, and cases in which those lines are breached. This fall (2020), she looks forward to exploring these issues with UNCG students as she teaches a seminar on gender, race, and the musical canon.
Toru Momii*
Harvard University
Toru Momii (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University. His research focuses on interculturality in twenty-first century music, the racial and colonial politics of U.S./Canadian music theory, performance analysis, gagaku, and popular music in the United States and Japan. His article, "A Transformational Approach to Gesture in Shō Performance” was awarded the Outstanding Publication Award from the Society for Music Theory, and his research has been recognized by the SMT-40 Dissertation Fellowship from the Society for Music Theory and the Junior Fellowship in Japan Studies from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He is a cofounder of the Engaged Music Theory Working Group, junior scholars committed to cultivating inclusive research, teaching, and service in music theory. Toru holds a Ph.D. in music theory from Columbia University, an M.A. in music theory from the Schulich School of Music of McGill University, and a B.A. in music and economics from Vassar College (Phi Beta Kappa). Previously, Toru has taught music theory and aural skills at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and Columbia University.
M. Myrta Leslie Santana
University of California San Diego
M. Myrta Leslie Santana is an ethnomusicologist and performer whose work examines the social and political significance of trans and queer performance in the Americas. Her book Transformismo: Performing Trans/Queer Cuba, an ethnography of drag performance in contemporary Cuba, will be published by the University of Michigan Press in February 2025. Other writing appears or is forthcoming in Small Axe, Ethnomusicology, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Queer Nightlife (Michigan). Originally from Miami, Florida, Leslie Santana is currently Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego.
Matthew D. Morrison
New York University
Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is an Assistant Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University, an. M.A. in Musicology from The Catholic University of America, and B.A. in music from Morehouse College. Matthew is a 2018-2019 fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American research at Harvard University. He has been as a research fellow with the Modern Moves research project at King’s College, London, funded by the European Research Council Advanced Grant, and has held fellowships from the American Musicological Society, Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress, the Center for Popular Music Study/Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, The Catwalk Artists Residency, and the Tanglewood Music Center. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed music journal, Current Musicology, and his published work has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, the Grove Dictionary of American Music, and on Oxford University Press’s online music blog. His in-progress book project, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the U.S. considers the implications of positing sound and music as major components of identity formations, particularly the construction of race.