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Karen Atkins comes to North Carolina from Indiana where she received a B.M. in French horn performance from Ball State University with minors in French and music history. Her main research interest is in early Baroque opera, but she has an abiding interest in horn history and also enjoys Haydn, Mozart, Rossini, and Queen. She is also interested in the pedagogy of music history. When not studying, she enjoys reading, writing, hiking, and cats. Will Boone is a native North Carolinian pursuing a doctorate at UNC-Chapel Hill. In 2008 he earned his M.A. in Musicology from UNC with a thesis entitled “Composing Playlists, Conducting Streams: The Life of Classical Music in the Internet Age.” Will is now working on a dissertation that will explore the intersections of culture, technology, spirituality, and the music industry in the performance of contemporary gospel in predominantly African-American churches in North Carolina. A passionate teacher with a deep interest in many African-American musical traditions, Will designed an undergraduate course entitled “The Hip-Hop Producer” which he taught for the first time in the summer of 2009. When he takes a break from his academic pursuits, Will loves to write songs, fish, read good fiction, and laugh at crass humor. He hosts a weekly radio show on UNC’s student station WXYC. |
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Molly M. Breckling is a native of Appleton, Wisconsin. She holds a B.S. in Music-Liberal Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, an M.M. in Vocal Performance from Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN, an M.A. in Music History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an M.A. in Musicology from UNC. She published an article in the Summer, 2004 volume of Music Research Forum on issues of narrative and epistemology in the art songs of Gustav Mahler. She is working on a dissertation on narrative in the ballads from Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Molly has served as an adjunct faculty member teaching Music Appreciation for Austin Peay State University since 1998. Joshua Busman comes to Chapel Hill from just over the mountains in Tennessee where he completed a B.M. in Composition at Middle Tennessee State University. Joshua is especially interested in the intersections with theology and philosophy in early twentieth-century opera. He continues to compose and perform in the Gamelan at UNC. When not studying or writing, Joshua enjoys reading books, collecting vinyl records and being an amateur gourmand.
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Christian Conkle, a native of Southern California, received a B.A. in Music from Grinnell College, where he studied composition, performance, and music history. His master’s thesis reconstructed the association in late-1930s American public rhetoric between traditional musical aesthetics and non-intervention in European war. He was a participant in the 2009 Schönberg Akademie at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, where he presented original archival research regarding Schönberg’s teaching in the mid 1940s. His interests also include musical ontology and transmission, the history of pedagogy, and the web of interactions between listeners, dancers, patrons, performers, and composers. |
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Jinmi Davidson |
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Megan Eagen earned degrees in Physics and Music Composition from Iowa State University in 2007. Her senior recital, made up entirely of original works, included three chamber pieces, a song cycle, a choral sextet, and three movements from her first symphony, “Bells for Raskolnikov.” Megan received her MA from the University of Chicago in 2008. In her master’s thesis, entitled “Appropriation and Assimilation: Presence and Significance of Marian Texts in the 17th Century Lutheran Liturgy,” she examined the role of Mary in Protestant liturgical works composed during the Thirty Years War. Megan’s musicological focus continues to be seventeenth century liturgy and counterpoint, though she is also interested in plainchant, polyphony, Schenkerian analysis and Irish traditional music (“Trad.”). Megan has played piano for over twenty years and oboe for fifteen. She continues to compose and teach piano, while also participating in the UNC Symphony Orchestra. Outside of music, she enjoys running, Ceili dancing, reading, writing, and spending time outdoors.
Ryan Ebright holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music and Economics from Westmont College. In 2006 he earned a Master of Music degree in Musicology and Vocal Performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with British bass-baritone John Shirley-Quirk. His master's thesis explored Franz Schubert's settings of Johann Mayrhofer's neoclassical poems, and his research interests include mid- to late-Romantic German Lieder and contemporary American opera. |
galileo@email.unc.edu |
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Kimberly Francis is a doctoral candidate at UNC-CH, where she is also an International Fellow of the American Association of University Women. With the support of the AMS Wolf Travel Grant and a Georges Lurcy Fellowship, Kimberly spent the 2007-2008 academic year conducting research in Paris, France and Basel, Switzerland for her dissertation entitled: “Mediating Modern Music: Nadia Boulanger Constructs Igor Stravinsky.” Her paper “Il reste encore des questions: Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky Develop the Symphonie de Psaumes” was awarded the Paul A. Pisk prize at the 2008 meeting of the American Musicological Society. Kimberly has recent or forthcoming articles in Musical Quarterly, the International Alliance of Women and Music Journal, the Revue de Musicologie and Music Theory Online. She will also be a contributing author to Patricia Hall’s forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship. Kimberly’s interests include gender studies, music of the twentieth century (both modern and postmodern), critical theory, women and popular music, and Mozart opera. |
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Matthew Franke completed his B.A. in music at the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, WA, in 2007 with a focus in music history. His musicological interests are broad, though the construction and interpretation of musical meaning have been central to his interests in English lute-song, medieval music, and Puccini's operas. In 2009, Matthew completed a master’s thesis on 12th- and 13th-century sequences from the Abbey of Saint-Denis, and spent a summer in Washington, D.C., on a Pruett Summer Research Fellowship, where he worked with the materials of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. As a classical guitarist, he is also interested in the early history and masters of the guitar. When not studying musicology, Matthew occasionally writes music, and reads history for fun. |
mmfranke@email.unc.edu |
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Will Gibbons holds a B.A. magna cum laude from Emory & Henry College (Piano and French Language/Literature) and an M.A. from UNC-CH (Musicology). His dissertation deals with the reception of Classical-period opera in Paris around the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to his dissertation topic, Will’s major areas of research interest include nineteenth-century American music and music in video games. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of journals, including 19th-Century Music, American Music, Eighteenth-Century Life, The Journal of the Society for American Music, and Music and the Moving Image. Will is a past recipient of the Elizabeth M. Bartlett Travel Award from the AMS, and currently holds a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Also active as a performer, Will frequently appears as a pianist, harpsichordist, and organist in the Triangle area. |
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Naomi Graber is from the greater Washington, D.C. area. She received her B.A. in Music History and English from Brandeis University in 2007. In 2009, she completed her M.A. at UNC with a thesis on thematic connections in Beethoven’s late works. She is now working on a dissertation on Kurt Weill's early American career. Her broader research interests include American musical theater, sonata form(s), and historiography. |
ngraber@email.unc.edu |
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Dan Guberman is from South Setauket, New York. He received a Bachelor of Music in double bass performance from the Eastman School of Music in 2006. As a first-year graduate student in musicology, he is interested in the interaction of music and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in live concerts. He is excited at the prospect of not waking up to snow on the ground in April anymore. |
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Benjamin Haas, a native of Western North Carolina, is a first-year graduate student at UNC. He holds a B.M. in music education from Cedarville University and an M.M. in musicology from the University of North Texas. While at UNT, Benjamin completed a thesis on the intersection of children’s music and leftist pedagogy in 1930s America. His research interests include 20th century American music, music and politics, and music in educational contexts. |
bhaas@email.unc.edu |
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Catherine Hughes completed her BA in music and French at the College of the Holy Cross. Before starting at UNC, she spent a year teaching English in Bergerac, France. Her research interests include 19th and 20th century French music, and opera. She has played the cello for fourteen years, and enjoys playing in chamber ensembles. Brian Jones is a
native of Salt Lake City, Utah. He holds a B.M. in music education from the
University of Utah and an M.A. in musicology from Brigham Young University. His
master’s thesis, “Finding the Avant-garde in the Old-time: John Cohen in the
American Folk Revival,” |
cahugh@email.unc.edu |
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Laurie McManus completed her B.A at the College of
William and Mary as a music and history double major. Now
at Chapel Hill she is working on her dissertation "The Rhetoric of
Sexuality in German Music Criticism, 1848-1883" under the direction
of Professor Jon Finson. Recipient of a fellowship from the Berlin
Program for Advanced German and European Studies, Laurie will spend the
2008-9 academic year researching in Germany. Her masters thesis focused
on Duke Ellington's engagement with world music in the Afro-Eurasian
Eclipse. Along with a general enthusiasm for theory and analysis across
all periods, she is also interested in aesthetics of electro-acoustic
composition and early instrumental music. In her spare time, Laurie
plays harpsichord and draws satirical music cartoons. |
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Tim Miller is originally from Kensington, Maryland, and received his B.M. from the University of Delaware. In 2007, he received his M.M. in the History of Musical Instruments from the University of South Dakota, with a thesis on the origins and development of the pedal steel guitar. While a graduate assistant at the National Music Museum in Vermillion, SD, he conducted research in several European archives and collections, and read papers at conferences for the American Musical Instruments Society. His primary research interests involve the individual roles of instruments and instrumentalists in small ensembles, particularly in European music of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as well as American popular and country music of the first half of the twentieth century. Tim is an active performer on double bass, lute, and theorbo, and is frequently found playing sitar, oud, mandolin, pedal steel, or whatever other stringed instruments he finds lying around the house. |
tdmiller@email.unc.edu |
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Anna Ochs hails from Chicago, IL, where she grew-up near Wrigley Field. She graduated from Vanderbilt University in 2004 with degrees in voice and anthropology. She received an M.A. in musicology from Pennsylvania State University in 2004. At Penn State she wrote a master's thesis on English and Italian opera in late-18th century London. She is now pursuing a Ph.D. in musicology at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she is working on a dissertation entitled, "Opera in Contention: Opera as a Microcosm of Social Conflict in the Porfiriato." In addition to art music, Anna is a big fan of country music and old standards. Her research interests include Latin/o American music, 18th-20th-century vocal music (especially opera), music of the Holocaust, gender studies, fashion studies, and performativity. |
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Vanessa Pelletier is originally from Québec City. She completed her Bachelor of Music degree with Distinction at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 2007, and in 2007-2008, she was a Post-degree student in the German Department at Queen’s University. Vanessa’s interests are in mediaeval liturgical and sacred music, particularly plainchant and Aquitanian and Notre Dame polyphony. In particular, she is interested in stylistic analysis of this period. In addition to her musicological studies, Vanessa is a member of The Malyshko Collegium, an early music ensemble directed by Dr. Olga E. Malyshko, and with whom she has recorded a CD entitled Musical Echoes of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In her spare time, Vanessa enjoys studying plants, reading French literature and working on her calligraphic skills. |
vpelleti@email.unc.edu |
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Allison Portnow, originally from Huntington, NY, received her Bachelor of Music at McGill University (Montreal) in 2005. In completing her Music major (Double Bass concentration) and a second major in Cultural Studies, she became interested in the interaction of these two fields. Allison completed her M.A. at UNC Chapel Hill in 2007, with a Master's Thesis on narrativity and musical time in Sibelius's "Lemminkainen Suite." Her musicological interests include musical semiotics, documentary film music, and the intersection of scientific and musical discourses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a subject that she is beginning dissertation work on. Allison continues to perform at UNC playing the bass in the UNC Symphony Orchestra, Violone in the Baroque Ensemble, and Bass Gamba in the Viol Consort. |
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Douglas Shadle graduated summa cum laude from the University of Houston in 2004 with a B.M. in viola performance and a minor in English literature. He earned an M.A. from UNC in 2006 with a thesis on the musical practices of a local African-American Catholic parish. His dissertation explores nationalism in American symphonies composed before the Civil War. His other research interests include French modernism between the two World Wars, music and theology, and the history of Catholic liturgical music. He currently serves as a co-chair of the Society for American Music’s Student Forum. |
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Karen Shadle, a fourth year graduate student from Louisville, Kentucky, received her B.A.from Centre College in 2005 with majors in music and government. Karen loves to travel and has studied local music cultures abroad in Morocco and Northern Ireland. In 2007, she completed a thesis on the operas of Mozart and his contemporaries. She is currently working on a dissertation that explores American psalmody during the Revolutionary War period. A pianist and singer, Karen enjoys the occasional performance opportunity and is active in several community groups. |
wicke@email.unc.edu |
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Chris Wells graduated with high honors from Guilford College with a BA in music and political science. He earned departmental honors in music with a thesis applying methodology from comparative politics to the debate on “registers” within voice pedagogy. Now a first-year student at UNC, Chris is interested in Jazz and other African-American music from the late nineteenth century through World War II and connections with dance in both social and performance contexts. This interest is informed by Chris’s experience dancing, performing, and teaching Lindy Hop, Charleston, and other early Jazz dances both in the U.S. and in Europe. Other interests include German and American art song, music and political revolutions, and "entrance music" in professional wrestling. Chris also writes regular articles on medical liability issues for Greensboro-based Medical Justice Services, Inc. |
cjwells@email.unc.edu |
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Jeff Wright is a third-year graduate student from Mesa, Arizona. He holds a Bachelor of Musical Arts degree from DePauw University with an emphasis in music and mathematics, as well as a Master of Arts degree in Musicology from UNC. In 2007, Jeff completed a thesis examining the reception of European Disco in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In addition to popular music, Jeff is also interested in gender and sexuality studies, American music in the first half of the 20th century, and the music of Samuel Barber. |