Drew Borecky
Drew Borecky published his first journal article “Dungeons, Dragons, and Music: The Immersive Qualities of Sound in Dungeons & Dragons” in the Journal for Sound and Music in Games.
Read more in this feature story from February 2021. |
John Caldwell
John Caldwell successfully defended his dissertation, “Songs from the Other Side: Listening to Pakistani Voices in India” in March. |

Melissa Camp
Melissa Camp received her M.A. in May with a thesis titled “‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised … But It Will Be Streamed’: Spotify, Playlist Curation, and Social Justice Movements.” |

Michael Carlson
Michael Carlson received a summer dissertation grant from the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS). |

Erica Fedor
Erica Fedor successfully defended her dissertation, “Sounding Statecraft: U.S. Cultural Diplomacy Programs in the Twenty-First Century” in May. |
Ken Ge
Ken Ge has a chapter on jazz, gender, and the bassist Dennis Irwin is forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Jazz and Gender, titled “Resurrecting Masculinity: Gender, Jazz Timbre, and the Afterlife of Dennis Irwin’s Bass.”
Ge also served as one of the organizers for the new AMS Jazz Study Group, and is happy to share that the group is now approved and looks forward to holding its first (virtual) meeting this fall! |
Elias Gross
Elias Gross received a Summer Research Grant from the Center for the Study of the American South. |
A. Kori Hill
Kori Hill published “A Reflection and Call to Action” on icareifyoulisten.com as the “Out of Context” series finale and participated in the series wrap-up roundtable.
This blog post was also featured on the “Do the Work Wednesdays” series. Read that feature here. |
Aldwynn Hogg Jr.
Aldwyn Hogg Jr. received the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship from the American Musicological Society and will give a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music in June titled “‘Whitey on the Moon:’ Lunar Criticism in African American Poetry and Music.” He was also awarded a New York Public Library Short-Term Fellowship for summer 2021. |
Tara Jordan
Tara Jordan received her M.A. in May with a thesis titled “Mobilizing Mary: Eleonora Gonzaga’s Religious and Political Influence as Shown in Two Settings of a Pianto della Madonna.” Jordan also earned the 2021 Graduate Student Research and Writing Grant from the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies.
“This grant will fund a stay in Seattle this summer as I complete ethnographic fieldwork in Sephardic Jewish synagogues as well as a summer language course in Ladino.” -Tara Jordan |
Grace Kweon
Grace Kweon gave a paper at the annual meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US chapter in May titled “Music From Chinatown’s Basement: Performing Race, Activism and Community In New York’s Asian American movement, 1970-1975.” |
Mike Levine
Mike Levine received funding this year from a UNC Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Mellon Conference Award from the Institute for the Study of the Americas, and a Southern Futures Award, Center for the Study of the American South.
Levine published “Sounding El Paquete: The Local and Transnational Routes of an Afro-Cuban Repartero” Refereed article in Cuban Studies, no. 50 (April 2021). https://upittpress.org/books/9780822946229/.
He presented “Sneaking Across the Digital Divide: Piracy and Music Making in Havana’s Bedroom Studios” at The American Musicological Society’s 86th Annual Meeting, Virtual Conference, Nov 7, 2020, and The Society for Ethnomusicology’s 65th Annual Meeting, Virtual Conference, Oct 29, 2020. |
Kari Lindquist
Kari Lindquist received a summer research grant through the Center for the Study of the American South.
“I will be researching how women folksingers use varying narrative perspectives in Southern Appalachian songs about women as birds to establish authority in the oral tradition and create intimacy with audiences. The grant will support my work as I use archival materials from the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC and Berea College.” -K. Lindquist |
Meg Orita
Meg Orita will give a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music in June titled “Take that, Tipper Gore”: Alanis Morissette, US Suburbia, and the Politics of Consumer Friendliness.” She also presented the paper at the annual meeting of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, US chapter. |

Erin Pratt
Erin Pratt will be a doctoral fellow with the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies for 2021-2022 at the Freie Universität. |
Kelli Smith-Biwer
Created a new A/V studio in Hill Hall where students and faculty can record video presentations. She also led a “How To” session on editing videos for conference presentations.
Watch “How to Make Conference Presentation Videos in Adobe Rush” here. |
Kendall Winter
Kendall Winter will give a paper at the annual meeting of the Society for American Music in June titled “Political Contrafacta: Intersections of Race, Gender, and Power in Reconstruction Kansas.”
Winter also published “Sweet Honey in the Rock” on the department’s new “Do the Work Wednesdays” series. Read her DWW installment here. |
Alterity Seminar
Students in Annegret Fauser’s Alterity Seminar created an e-zine, podcast, and syllabi to discuss Alterity in Western Classical Music. These new resources were featured on the department’s “Do the Work Wednesdays” series.
View the DWW feature here. |
Carolina Symposia in Music and Culture
The 2020-2021 Carolina Symposia of Music and Culture Lecture Series brought four guest lectures to our community via Zoom. The series was organized by the CSMC committee, co-chaired by Melissa Camp and Tara Jordan.
- January 15, 2021 | Jessica Swanston Baker, Assistant Professor of Music, University of Chicago
- February 5, 2021 | Olivia Bloechl, Professor of Musicology, University of Pittsburgh
- February 26, 2021 | Miki Kaneda, Assistant Professor of Music, Musicology, and Ethnomusicology, Boston University
- April 9, 2021 | Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music Theory, Hunter College, CUNY
Learn more about the series speakers here. |