About

Rachel Mundy (Executive Editor, she/her) studies the way debates about whether or not animals are musical have served as a proxy for debates about the worth and value of marginalized voices in a post-climate change world. Since the 19th century, music-making has had a foundational place in modern claims about ethics, life, and human identity. Mundy’s work explores these claims through case studies at the intersection of sound studies, animal studies, the history of science, postcolonial history, gender studies, and environmental history. She teaches at Rutgers University, Newark.

Siv B. Lie (Deputy Editor; “seev bee lee,” she/her) is interested in relationships between cultural production, race, and politics. Her research in ethnomusicology and linguistic anthropology examines how Romani (“Gypsy”) groups use music and language to advance their own sociopolitical and economic interests. She teaches at the University of Maryland. More information can be found on her website.

Andrea F. Bohlman (she/her) studies the political stakes of music making and sound in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, weaving together archival and ethnographic methodologies. She teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Much of her writing thinks through questions of political agency and strategies of shaping social movements through sound and music in Central and Eastern Europe. Bohlman’s articles and presentations on the history of sound recording—on mixtapes, soundwalks, and flash mobs—focus on the everyday, with particular enthusiasm for creative work with tape and tape recording.

Canto V Engelhard is an artist and researcher whose practice unfolds from collaboration and resonance. Originally from Lima, they write about Andean ancestral technologies, creative remembrance and waterstewardship. They work soundscapes from performance with participatory sound designs towards poetic and socioenvironmental justice. They teach community workshops around recording and listening and undergraduate classes at Columbia University, where they are a PhD candidate. Their musical project, Canto Villano, is guided by water (yakumama) as master, weaving sonorities that honor the histories of territories with stone percussion, song and pututo.

ken tianyuan Ge (he/him) is a writer, musician, and photographer from the U.S. South. His research asks how power, capital, and the past permeate the world of cruise tourism. He maintains a career as a working bassist, and has worked as musical director for Celebrity Cruises and Oceania Cruises, and most recently as director of the cruise division at Suman Entertainment Group. ken’s scholarly work builds on these experiences, investigating gender and masculinity in jazz, Black sonic-spatial practices in the “Golden Age” of U.S. radio, the affective-aesthetic dimensions of the climate crisis, and the shape of corporatized musical life at sea.

Paola Cossermelli Messina is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. Her dissertation investigates Arab memory and belonging in music and sonorities which emerged from an extensive history of migration between Bilad al-Sham and Brazil. She holds a B.A. in Music and Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. in Media Studies from The New School. Previous projects include an oral history of Iranian musicians in exile (awarded the Middle East Studies Association’s Graduate Student Paper Prize in 2016) and an experimental ethnography on jukebox-patron interactions in a lesbian bar in Brooklyn. For the past eight years, she has produced and edited the Arab Studies Institute’s podcast Status / الوضع. 

Cibele M. Moura (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in music and sound studies at Cornell University, where she studies Latin American and Latinx culture. Her interests include the deployment of popular music in social movements, the production of subjectivities in racial capitalism, and the links between racial and aesthetic formations. Moura’s current research focuses on the politics of obscenity and their vexed relationship with sonic cultures, aurality, and knowledge production. Building on obscenity’s conceptual instability, she explores the everyday workings of musical taste as it intersects with the racialization of sexualities.

Adebola Ola (Bola) (he/him/his) is a Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at Boston University. He holds a BA, BM (Hons), and MM from the University of Cape Town, South Africa. His current research focuses on the Afro-diasporic circuitous flow of large-box lamellophones, particularly in West Africa and the Caribbean. Additionally, he examines the relationship between music and language, exploring how musicians manipulate non-somatic sound sources to achieve speech surrogacy. His broader research interests include Afro-Asian studies, Ethiopian melodic systems (kinit), West Asian modes (maqām), and West African and South African popular music.

James Parsons is a music historian who studies the German art song and Beethoven with particular emphasis on the choral finale of the Ninth. His Lied research begins with the eighteenth century and continues to the twentieth, a special interest being the Hollywooder Liederbuch of Hanns Eisler. He teaches at Missouri State University.

Rena Roussin (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, where she is writing an in-progress dissertation on constructions of disability and gender in Joseph Haydn’s late oratorios. More broadly, Rena’s research interests include conceiving of art music and music theatre as forms of activism in both historic and current contexts. As a Métis and settler European woman with additional Haida ancestry, she also has a major interest in the work Indigenous creators and performers are undertaking in opera and art music in Canada to further Indigenous equity and resurgence.

Marcus R. Pyle (he/him) is a professor of musicology at Davidson College. His research centers on depictions of operatic femmes fatales, Black female subjectivity, voice studies, French modernism, and the metaphysics of fictional entities. He writes about ways in which individuals transgress material, social boundaries. He is an active violist and founder of ChamberWorks Music Institute.  

Juan Fernando Velasquez Ospina is an Assistant professor at the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston. His research intersects cultural history and sound studies to explore the relations between sound, technology, and social formation processes, bringing together questions about privilege, modernity, and sound ecologies in Latin American Cities. His articles have been widely published and he is working on his second book Inscribing Sounds: Music Technologies and Aural Culture in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century Colombia. Velasquez has also has been the recipient of several national and international grants and fellowships.

María Edurne Zuazu (she/they) works at the nexus of music, sound, and media studies, and researches the intersections of material culture and sonic/musical practices in relation to questions of cultural memory, social and environmental justice, and the production of knowledge in the 20^th and 21^st centuries. Zuazu’s research spans topics including sound and multimedia art, popular music in nonfiction cinema, musical instruments, military aircraft sound, and weaponized sound technologies such as the Long-Range Acoustic Device. Zuazu currently teaches media and sound studies courses at New York University.