Contributors

Jonathan Bellman is the Area Head of Academic Studies in Music, and Professor of Music History and Literature at the University of Northern Colorado. He earned piano performance degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Illinois, and a Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance Practices at Stanford University in 1990. His latest book, Chopin’s Polish Ballade: Op. 38 as Narrative of National Martyrdom, was just published by Oxford University Press; he has also published books with Northeastern University Press (The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe, 1993, and The Exotic in Western Music, 1998), and one with Longman, A Short Guide to Writing about Music (2000; 2nd ed. 2007). He is one of the writers for the musicology weblog Dial M for Musicology; his research interests include musical exoticism and the music and performance practices of Frédéric Chopin.

Philip Brett (1937–2002) was an English-born American musicologist, choral conductor, and harpsichordist who taught in the University of California at Berkeley (1966–90), Riverside (1991–2001), and at Los Angeles as Distinguished Professor of Musicology (2001–02). A brilliant exponent of the work of William Byrd and Benjamin Britten, Brett is best known as a founder of LGBTQ musicology. In 1977 he published “Britten and Grimes,” the first scholarly article to incorporate a composer’s queer sexuality in its critical formulations. He was central to the 1989 founding of the AMS Gay and Lesbian Study Group (GLSG), co-edited the inaugural 1994 collection Queering the Pitch, and witnessed the GLSG’s 1999 establishment of an annual Philip Brett Award for the best work in LGBTQ musicology. Brett was at the forefront of musicology’s interdisciplinary expansion and is credited with helping many musicologists and others make their scholarship relevant and meaningful to themselves and their own lives.

Nadine Hubbs is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Music and Director of Undergraduate Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, where she also advises the LGBTQ Graduate Certificate and co-founded the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative. Her scholarly interests include popular and classical music, gender and queer studies, modern American culture, and social class. Her cultural history of the Thomson-Copland circle, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (California, 2004), won citations including the 2006 Philip Brett Award. She received support from the CLAGS 2009 Martin Duberman Fellowship for her current book project Unmapped Country: Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, which critically examines dominant forms of social and sexual subjectivity through optics of social theory and country music.

James Kennaway is a Wellcome Research Fellow in the History of Medicine at the University of Durham, UK. He is writing a book on Pathological Music, which is on the history of the idea that music can over-stimulate the nerves and make listeners sick, hysterical, and even kill them. He completed a PhD in Musicology at UCLA in 2004, following an MMus from King’s College, London and a BA from the London School of Economics. Before starting at Durham, he worked at Stanford University, the University of Vienna, and the Viadrina University in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Germany.

Sean Nye is a PhD student in the Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society program at the University of Minnesota, pursuing minors in music and German. His doctoral thesis concerns constructions of German identity in popular electronic music from Krautrock to techno. Research foci include Theodor W. Adorno, electronic and Goth-industrial music, philosophical aesthetics of music, subcultural studies, and intermedial studies of music, literature, and film. Nye has received fellowships from the Fulbright program, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. He has published reviews and articles in a variety of journals and independent media, including Cultural Critique and Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music, and he has worked as a translator of articles by Rolf Tiedemann and Karl Heinz Bohrer.