Nasser Al-Taee is an assistant professor of Musicology at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He specializes in 18th-century Orientalism as well as in the political, social, and cultural exchange between East and West. Dr. Al-Taee holds a B.A. in Music from the University of Washington, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Musicology from UCLA. He has published in The Opera Quarterly, Popular Music, and Pride.
Robynn Stilwell received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation was an interdisciplinary study of the Stravinsky-Balanchine collaboration, and this interest in music, movement, and perceptions of narrative has persisted through not just dance (including figure skating), but also popular music and performance, music video, musicals, and television and film. She is interested in the interaction of music with other media as a recorder, circulator, and generator of cultural meaning, especially in the formation and policing of identity boundaries. After teaching for seven years at the University of Southampton, England, she now teaches at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
Andrew Berish is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at UCLA. Drawing on geography, musicology, and American history, his dissertation will examine the ways Swing-era jazz dealt with pressing issues of dislocation as the result of rapid modernization and urbanization. He has also presented papers on musical cross-currents in the American Southwest and the racial politics of Led Zeppelin. After finding his way out of the library stacks and navigating the massive Los Angeles freeway system home, Andrew enjoys spending the remaing few hours of his day practicing the guitar.
Ben Carson begins this year as a professor of Music Theory and Cognition at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has served as artist in residence (1999) at the perception laboratory at L'Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique. Carson studied composition with John Rahn at the University of Washington, and with Roger Reynolds at the University of California, San Diego, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2001. Essays and correspondence on Carson’s dissertation “The Self and Its Pleasures” are forthcoming from critic Christopher Williams in OPEN SPACE, the Bard College journal of new music and art.
Jessica M. Courtier received an M.A. in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia and is currently a doctoral candidate in Musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interests include studies of gender, feminist theory, and race, particularly as they relate to American 20th-century musics. She is currently working on a project on representations of blues and jazz in early short sound films.
Charles Hiroshi Garrett is a doctoral candidate in Musicology at UCLA, currently supported by an Alvin H. Johnson AMS-50 fellowship from the American Musicological Society. Formerly an assistant editor of the journal American Music, Charles works across a variety of musical genres and is writing his dissertation on the intersections of race, class, and nation in 20th-century American music.
Russell Grigg teaches philosophy and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University and works as a psychoanalyst in Melbourne. His translation of Lacan’s Seminar 17, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis will soon appear with Norton. His published work has mainly been on Freud and Lacan.
Marie Jorritsma is a Ph.D. student in Ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is South African born and obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Music at the University of Port Elizabeth. She continued her studies at Rice University in Houston, and completed her Master’s degree under the supervision of Marcia J. Citron. Her Master’s thesis, on the topic of South African women composers, takes a closer look at the lives and works of Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph, Princess Constance Magogo, and Rosa Nepgen. Ms Jorritsma’s research interests center in South African music, especially issues of post-colonialism, nationalism, gender, and post-apartheid forms.
Kerry Murphy is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Music at the University of Melbourne. Her book Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism was published by UMI Studies in Musicology and she has published widely on 19th-century French music criticism. She also works in the area of Australian music research where she has published editions of early Australian opera and art song and is currently leading a project investigating the formation of musical taste in pre-federation Victoria.
Louis Niebur is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at ULCA. He is writing a dissertation on electronic music in British radio and television, specifically the development of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Most recently he has presented papers on English football songs, electronic sound effects in 1950s radio, and electronic stock music in 1960s British television.
