Kate Altizer was born and raised in Tazewell, a small Virginia town in the heart of Appalachia. She received degrees in piano and vocal performance from Emory & Henry College and MM degrees in piano performance and music history from West Virginia University. Her research centers on animals, particularly humpback whales, and music, exploring what it means to be a good listener across species. Other interests include music history pedagogy and music and sound in movies. Kate and Professor Giovanni Zanovello recently received a SOTL grant from the IU Office of the Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education to develop methods of authentic learning in a course on sounding events in Early Modern Europe, and she is a participant in the inaugural summer program of the Animals & Society Institute. When she’s not teaching piano lessons, Kate enjoys taking long walks around Bloomington with her lab mix, Gilda.
Jessica Bachman is an MA student in Musicology originally from Rapid City, South Dakota. She recently graduated with a BM in Cello Performance with honors from the University of Northern Colorado, studying with Dr. Gal Faganel. Her research interests include topics and narrative in the French string chamber music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as the musicological approach to innovative artistic programming in both orchestral and chamber ensembles. Jessica completed a thesis entitled “Claude Debussy’s Sonata for Violoncello and Piano: Style, Tradition, Burlesquerie” under the tutelage of Drs. Jonathan Bellman, Janice Dickensheets, and Michael Oravitz and was given the university’s prestigious “meritorious thesis” award for 2019. She has presented her work on Debussy at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society’s Rocky Mountain Chapter and given several guest lectures on fin de siècle chamber music at Front Range Community College. In the summers, Jessica works on the artistic operations team at the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, assisting in the production of large-scale orchestral and chamber concerts, community outreach events, and contributing writing for the season’s program book.
Andrew Barrett is a third-year master’s student pursuing a double-degree in musicology and guitar. Originally from Nebraska, Andrew completed his BM in guitar at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. His research interests include Spanish music, music and politics, and the creation of musical identities. At IU Andrew works as an associate instructor the theory department and as an editorial assistant for the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature.
Emily Baumgart is a PhD student in Musicology.
Chelsey Belt is a PhD candidate from Woodstock, IL. She received her MM in musicology from Boston University and her BME (music education) from Illinois Wesleyan University. Her research addresses the transmission and practice of solo song in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Italy. Her pedagogical interests center on representations of difference in early modern Europe and its historiography. Chelsey studies Baroque violin with Stanley Ritchie and also enjoys performing on a variety of violas da gamba and medieval bowed strings.
Nicolette van den Bogerd is a PhD musicology student from the Netherlands, with minors in Jewish Studies and ethnomusicology. She received her BM in violin performance, MM in violin performance, and MA in musicology from California State University Long Beach. Her research interests include music and the Holocaust, constructions of Jewishness in music, and music and politics, with a special focus on twentieth century Poland and Eastern and Central Europe. Much of her work is interdisciplinary, engaging in the areas of memory studies and trauma studies. Nicolette currently serves a term as a board member of the Jewish Studies and Music Group at the American Musicological Society. She has presented her work in the United States, Poland, and Belgium.
Caitlin Brown earned her BA in Music and French from New York University, and her MA in Musicology from the University of Maryland, College Park. She primarily studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century American music; her dissertation focuses on artist colonies and American composers' interest in physical, intellectual, and spiritual displacement in the early twentieth century. Caitlin hails from the Hoosier State and cheers exclusively for Indiana basketball.
Jaime Carini pursues dual doctorates in Musicology and Organ Performance and Literature. She completed her master's thesis, Terrain of the Gods: Verdi’s Attila as Risorgimento Narrative, on expressions of Italian and Venetian patriotism in the opera, Attila, by Giuseppe Verdi. Jaime continued her work on Verdi by reviewing the first English edition of The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi by Abramo Basevi for the December 2015 issue of Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association. As an organist, Ms. Carini participated in a public recital performance for PipeDreams Live! at Indiana University, which aired nationwide on American Public Media in October 2016. Her research interests include the nineteenth century, historical keyboard performance, and the relationship between music performance and economics.
Carolyn Carrier is a PhD candidate, originally from Hixson, TN, and currently residing in Philadelphia. She received a BM in piano performance from Furman University and a MM in piano performance from University of North Carolina Greensboro. She specializes in music of the early- to mid-nineteenth century, and is currently working on her dissertation about Romantic memory and Robert Schumann’s album leaves. In spring 2016, she won the William H. Scheide Prize from the American Bach Society for her article, “Hearing the ‘Töne eines Passionsliedes’ in J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio: The Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception of BWV 248,” published in Bach: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute (2014). Before moving to Philadelphia, Carolyn taught music history and theory at Furman University, where she also worked as music director in the theatre department. She is currently interning in the development department at FringeArts, a non-profit dedicated to contemporary performance.
Katie Chapman is a PhD student in musicology from Rock Hill, South Carolina. She has a BM in Music Theory from Furman University in Greenville, SC, and also majored in History. Her recent research interests include medieval monophony, medievalisms in the 19th-21st centuries, and the development of intellectual property ideas in the 16th-18th centuries. She also uses digital humanities approaches in her work, including mapping, comparison, and statistical analysis of both texts and melodies, and she is a HASTAC scholar for IDAH for 2016-2017. The beta version of her Troubadour Melodies Database is now live (http://troubadourmelodies.org). She is currently working on her dissertation, “Heresy, Politics, and the Transmission of Troubadour Song.”
Molly Covington is a PhD student in Musicology. She received her Bachelor of Music in theory from the University of North Texas, where she focused on musical modernism and music of the Holocaust. She earned her minor in German while studying in Leipzig. Molly’s current research focuses on amateur music of the early modern period, as well as jazz and the blues.
Adam Dillon is a specialist in historical trombones, performance practice, and chamber music. Recent performances include concerts with the Washington Cornett and Sackbutt ensemble, Forgotten Clefs (Renaissance winds), Las Aves, and Sacabuche, at events such as the American Musicological Society Conference, University of Oregon Musicking Conference, Festival Internacional de Música Sacra de Quito, North Carolina HIP Festival, and the Sackville and Bloomington Early Music Festivals. Adam’s performance and research interests include liturgical music of the 16th and 17th centuries. In January 2018 he was featured as an emerging professional in Early Music America’s EMagazine's Early to Rise series. Adam holds a Bachelor of Music from the University of North Texas and a Master of Music in Historical Performance from Indiana University. In addition to his performance experience Adam is an active arts administrator and grant-writer with roles as the administrative coordinator for the Historical Performance Institute at Indiana University and co-founder of Las Aves - whose international debut was April 2019 in Quito, Ecuador. Adam serves his local community as the secretary for Bloomington Early Music, 501(c)(3). He is currently pursuing an MA in musicology.
Patrick Domico is a PhD student in Musicology.
Molly C. Doran is a PhD candidate in Musicology. Her dissertation, “Representing Trauma and Suffering on the Late-Nineteenth-Century Operatic Stage: Gender, Hysteria, Maternity, and Culture in France,” examines representations of women’s trauma and suffering in French opera, focusing on the performance of hysteria and maternity in works by Charles Gounod, Ambroise Thomas, and Jules Massenet. Combining critical analytical approaches from musicology, performance studies, and trauma studies, her work demonstrates how operatic performance, both historical and contemporary, can signify forms of witness-bearing. Applied to modern contexts, her critical strategies provide insight into how operatic performance choices can satisfy collective responsibilities to engage current issues of domestic violence and women’s rights, by breaking down barriers between stage and spectator and emphasizing female perspectives. Molly has received grants to present her work at major musicology, French studies, and trauma studies conferences in the US and abroad, and she will present at IRCAM in Paris in spring 2019. She currently teaches music history and writing classes at Northeastern University in Boston and piano at the Dedham School of Music in Dedham, MA. A French enthusiast, she spent summer 2018 studying the language in an immersive environment at Middlebury College in Vermont. Molly received her MM in music history from Bowling Green State University and her BA in music from Hillsdale College.
Stewart Duncan is a PhD student in Musicology with a minor in Choral Conducting. He received his BA in Oxbridge Honors Music History from William Jewell College in Liberty, MO. His research interests include choral music, particularly in England and Scotland, and musical nationalism, politics, and power in the early twentieth century. As a composer, his music has been published, commissioned, and performed in the United States, England, Scotland and Austria.
Maria Fokina is a PhD student in Musicology. She received her BA (Hons.) in Music from the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Russian music, Russian and Soviet ballet, and the music of Ottorino Respighi.
Jacqueline Fortier is a PhD student in Musicology from Quebec City, Canada. She received an MA in Musicology at Laval University. Her research interests include rap music and vocal performance in relation to text.
Benjamin Fowler is a PhD candidate in Musicology from Helena, MT and Richland, WA. He holds degrees in piano performance from the University of Montana and University of South Carolina and a M.M. In musicology from Northwestern University. His research interests are music of Mexico, eighteenth-century keyboard music, and American Music. As a recipient of the Tinker Foundation Grant for pre-dissertation research in Mexico, he spent time at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música archives looking at nineteenth-century Mexican piano music and opera."
Kirby Haugland is a PhD candidate in Musicology from El Paso, Texas. He holds an AB in Music and Mathematics from Harvard University and an MMus in Trumpet Performance from London's Royal College of Music. His dissertation, "Opera in Transition: Performing on the Leipzig and Dresden Stages, 1800-1817" focuses on how relationships between performers, audiences, governments, and the press shaped opera performance in early nineteenth-century Germany. He has received grants and fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the Royal College of Music, the Jacobs School of Music, and the IU Office of the Vice President for International Affairs. Kirby's other research interests include science-fiction film music and composer John Adams, on whom he presented at the 6th International Conference on Music and Minimalism. A former co-president of IU's Graduate Musicology Association, he is also a frequent contributor of program notes and lectures for IU Opera Theater productions.
Emily Heiress is an MA Musicology/MLS student. She holds a BA in Music from Iowa State University. Her current academic interests include music of Russia in the 20th century and the relationship between music and politics.
Anna Hinkley is an MA musicology/MLS student.
Amanda Jensen is a musicology PhD candidate with a minor in Renaissance Studies. Originally from Missouri City, Texas, she received BA degrees in Plan II Honors Program, ancient Greek, and music from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include Athanasius Kircher, music and magic before 1700 and systems of knowledge and information management.
Paul Killinger is a PhD candidate in Musicology. His research interests include commercial country music and the relationship between musical genre and commercial formats. He received his bachelor's degree in trumpet performance from Luther College, and his master's degree in musicology from Western Illinois University.
Anne Lake (B.Mus. in Flute Performance, Bowling Green State University, MLS, IU) is a PhD student in musicology with a minor in film studies. She has presented at Music and the Moving Image (May 2014, NYU), the Seventh International Conference on Music Since 1900 / Lancaster Music Analysis Conference (2011, Lancaster, England) and Soundtrack Cologne (2010, Köln, Germany). She has also been closely involved in the Greggiati project since 2015. Her research interests include film music, gender studies, digital humanities, 18th-19th c. music collectorship, and online collaborative webseries, and she hopes to dissertate on the scores of the recent glut of superhero films.
Nathan Landes is a PhD musicology student from Cranston, Rhode Island. He received his BM from Oberlin Conservatory and MM from New England Conservatory. His research deals with heavy metal, identity formation, and canonization. He is also interested in hip hop, the blues, and creating broadly relevant work.
Matthew Leone is a PhD musicology student from Huntington, New York. He received his BA from SUNY-Potsdam and MA from Indiana University. His research interests include Jan Ladislav Dussek’s life and music, nineteenth-century music, film music, national/cultural/historical constructs and issues of musical authenticity and identity.
Jacob Mauldwin is an MA musicology/MLS student.
Bret McCandless is a PhD student in the musicology program and is interested in American musical theater of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including aspects of transmission (through recordings and films), reception, genre-crossing, aesthetics, and identity politics. He has worked in particular with the music of Bernstein, Stravinsky, Sondheim, Lin Manuel-Miranda [there is more than Hamilton], and Dave Malloy. In December 2016, he will receive a Master’s in Library Science, with a specialization in music librarianship. Prior to coming to IU, he received a dual Bachelor’s Degree in Music (emphasis in music history and literature) and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences from Kansas State University. On occasion, he plays the cello in the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra.
Sarah Adele Kirkman McDonie is a PhD student in musicology from Oakville, Missouri. She holds a BME from DePauw University and an MA in musicology from Indiana University. Her research interests focus on noise, music and media, audience engagement, and performance spaces in the twentieth through twenty-first centuries. Outside of musicology, Sarah enjoys running, caring for her bonsai trees, and scuba diving.
Krista Mitchell is an MA musicology/MLS student.
Devon Nelson is a PhD candidate in Musicology with a minor in Historical Performance. They earned a Bachelor of Music degree from Roosevelt University in Chicago. Their research interests include music and antiquarianism in Britain, music printing and publishing, relationships between dance and music in the early modern period, and historical instruments. Devon is writing a dissertation on the construction of antiquarian music publications and their foundation in a wider multi-disciplinary antiquarian culture titled, “The Antiquarian Creation of a Musical Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” They were a recipient of a 2017-2018 Indiana University President’s Diversity Dissertation Fellowship. Devon has presented portions of their dissertation work at Indiana University's Historical Performance: Theory, Practice, and Interdisciplinarity conference, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference, and the Utrecht Early Music Festival's STIMU symposium, where they won the STIMU Young Scholar Award.
Grace Pechianu is a PhD student in musicology from Highland Park, Illinois. She holds a MM in musicology and a BM with concentrations in musicology and violin performance from Northwestern University. During her time at Northwestern, she studied music history and historical composition, worked on the Moldenhauer music collection, and participated in various chamber and orchestral ensembles. Grace is interested in the area where music and literature intersect. Her thesis, Thomas Mann’s ‘Doktor Faustus’ and the Post-War Concerto, investigates twentieth-century representations of the Faust legend in programmatic and instrumental music. Grace presented her research on musical compositions related to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus at the American Musicological Society’s Midwest chapter meeting in September 2018. She was awarded the American Bach Society’s Frances Brokaw Grant for an internship at the Riemenschneider Bach Institute in the summer of 2018. Her current research concentrates on the use of early electronic instruments in multimedia works from the interwar period.
Deanna Pellerano is an MA musicology/MLS student.
Brent Reidy is a candidate for a PhD in Musicology with a dissertation focused on President Kennedy's arts policies. Brent is the Deputy Director for Research & Collections Services at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. He oversees the library's four curators in music, dance, theatre, and recorded sound and helps to manage operations, budgets, and strategic initiatives. Before joining the library, Brent was a Senior Consultant at AEA Consulting, an arts management consultancy, where he facilitated strategic, business, and capital project planning for cultural institutions across the globe. He also led the firm's research and evaluation work, co-authoring studies on the impact of digital distribution on theatre in the UK (funded by Arts Council England, UK Theatre, and Society of London Theatre) and reaching new audiences through performance in unusual venues (funded by the James Irvine Foundation).
Aaron Riedford is a PhD student in musicology. He received his BA in music from the University of Evansville, where he studied piano with Garnet Ungar. His research explores the intersection between politics, the folk music revival, and rock ideology in the 1960s. As a performer, he plays with the Jewish band Kippah Groovin’ and rock band The Darwin Initiative. In 2017, he composed the score for Bullitt County, an independent feature film.
Meredith Rigby is a PhD musicology student. She received an MM in musicology from Baylor University and a BA in piano performance from Georgetown College. Her interests include connections between music and literature, British Romantic music, and music and outer space. She has recently presented her research on John Ireland piano music and Victorian poets at the Baylor Musicology Colloquium, and on Claude Debussy’s relationship to the Symbolist poets at the Baylor MTNA Collegiate Research Symposium.
Karen Stafford is a PhD student in Musicology with a minor in Early Music. Originally from Saint Louis, Missouri, she received a BM in Clarinet Performance, a BA in English, and a BA in Philosophy with a minor in Classical and Ancient Studies from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She also earned an MLS (Master of Library Science) from Indiana University. Her current research interests include music printing and publishing, nineteenth-century binder's volumes, information literacy, and library process improvement.
Elizabeth Stoner is a PhD Musicology student from Charleston, SC. She holds a BM in piano performance from Furman University and a MA in musicology from Indiana University. Her research interests include Ancient Greek musical aesthetics, the history of music theory, and manuscript studies.
Maura Sugg is an MA student in Musicology from Downingtown, PA. Prior to her studies at Indiana University, she earned a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John's College (Annapolis, MD), where she wrote a prize-winning Senior Essay on the role of silence in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. Her current research interests revolve around rhetoric in Renaissance vocal polyphony and philosophical influences on music and narrative. Outside of class, she sings in the Historical Performance Institute's ensemble, Concentus, and serves as both a Graduate Assistant and the Musicology department's representative to the Jacobs School's Student Representative Committee.
Matthew Van Vleet is a PhD candidate in musicology from Columbus, Ohio. He holds a BA in Music and a BS in Physics from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research interests include drum and bugle corps and music in the American military. Additionally, his doctoral minor is in cognitive science and he is a member of the Music and Mind Lab at Indiana University studying music cognition and perception. He has contributed program notes and lectures for IU Opera productions of Jake Heggie’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Mason Bates’s The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, and the upcoming production of Puccini’s Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi (February 2020).
Jillian Vernarsky grew up in a small town in Montana called Three Forks. Its name derives from the town’s position on the headwaters of the Missouri river. Fun fact: it is so small that the Science teacher is the mayor. It was here that Jillian embraced a great love for the outdoors in her backyard and also spent countless hours playing piano and reading literature which took her to far-off places. When she left for college, she landed in University of Puget Sound, a small liberal arts college in Tacoma, Washington, where she studied piano performance. She decided to continue her education in musicology and library science. She spent a year teaching piano at an academy and working in a music shop and wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. Jillian recently moved to Bloomington with her cat, Franny, where she is now a master's student in musicology and library science.
Sarah Ward is an MA musicology/MLS student. She received her BA in Religion and Anthropology with a minor in German from Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Her research interests include the preservation of legacy media formats, the intersection of data science and musicology, and the American shape-note tradition. In pursuit of these interests, she contributed to the “My Armenia” cultural sustainability project at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, served as the 2019 resident intern at the Sacred Harp Museum in Carrollton, GA, and has recently completed a year-long position as the Visiting Subject Liaison for the Anthropology, Sociology, Folklore and Ethnomusicology Departments at Indiana University.
Lindsey Weaver is a PhD student in Musicology. She received her Master of Library Science from Indiana University.
Travis Whaley is pursuing an MA in Musicology and MM in Organ Performance, currently studying with Dr. Chris Young. He received degrees in Music and German from Virginia Tech, where he studied piano with Dr. Tracy Cowden and composition with Dr. Kent Holliday. He completed undergraduate theses in German and English in fulfillment of two Honors Baccalaureate Diplomas. In the summer of 2014, he was one of 45 contestants in the International-Bach-Competition, held in Leipzig, Germany, and has conducted research twice at the Beethoven Haus in Bonn, Germany. His research interests include the late baroque to early romantic periods, predominately the music of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
Christine Wisch is a PhD candidate in musicology with a minor in ethnomusicology. Her work as a musicologist focuses on early nineteenth-century Spanish classical music and issues of nationalism, patronage, and identity. She is the recipient of a 2019 Dissertation Fellowship from the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi for her in-progress dissertation, “Politics, Patronage, and Music in 1830s Spain.” Her research has been presented at both national and international conferences and has been supported by a number of awards and grants, including a 2017 Mellon Pre-Dissertation grant from Indiana University’s Russian and Eastern European Institute (REEI) and the A. Peter Brown Research Travel Award. Recently, she worked as a research consultant on Hispanic topics for the tenth edition of the History of Western Music and its corresponding anthologies, and she continues to work for Indiana University’s Latin American Music Center (LAMC). Additionally, she has written program notes for orchestras across the country and remains an active violinist.
Nathan Wright is an MA student in Musicology from Fishers, Indiana and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Anderson University. His current academic interests include music in Renaissance culture and intersections of music and philosophy. He has contributed program notes to the University Singers and Summer Chorus ensembles. In addition to his research interests, Nathan is an avid choral singer and participates in several choral ensembles within the Jacobs School of Music.
Ryan Young is a PhD student in musicology. He received a dual BA in German Studies and Music Theory and Composition from the University of Indianapolis and an MA in Musicology from Indiana University. His research interests include music, theology, and rhetoric in early modern England, and he is currently working on his dissertation on community, metrical psalmody, and the formation of Puritan identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His entry on Heinrich Isaac, co-authored with Giovanni Zanovello, appears as a part of Oxford Bibliographies Online.