Each year, we’re astounded by the incredible work of our graduate students, who are not only students but also serve as instructors and teaching assistants. They provide so much to our musical community on a daily basis and we are so grateful!
This past academic year the 25 current graduate students presented papers, conducted research, and taught in the classroom as both TAs and lecturers. They also presented at and organized the 13th Annual UNC-KCL Graduate Student Music Conference, held at UNC on May 13 & 14! Huge thanks to UNC graduate students Melissa Camp, Tara Jordan, and Matteo Sammartano for serving on the organizing committee. This annual music conference brings together graduate students from UNC and King’s College London for two days of exciting presentations.
In May, the department was proud to celebrate six doctoral hoodings and one Master’s degree completion. Over the summer, these incredible researchers and educators will be traveling to conduct and present research across the US, the UK, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and more. They’ll be teaching summer courses at UNC and NCCU, among other institutions, and recent graduates will be preparing for new positions in their post-Carolina life.
We’re incredibly proud of each graduate student and so grateful for all they do to enhance musical learning and life at Carolina.
Danny Allen presented “A Struggle of Identity: Musicking in the Japanese American Incarceration Camps during World War II” at the Yale Graduate Music Symposium in February. He also presented “The Transmission and Embodiment of Shakuhachi Technique” at the UNC-KCL Conference in May. Danny was awarded the Asian American Center Research/Travel Award for Summer 2024 and the Kenan Graduate Student Activities Fund for Summer 2024. The awards will fund his research on the Japanese American Incarceration Camps and music for his master’s thesis.
Drew Borecky received a Mary Valentine and Andrew Cosman Research Fellowship at the Strong National Museum of Play to perform archival research for his dissertation on the intersection of Music and tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). He will present at a conference later this summer called Generation Analog 2024.
Melissa Camp presented “Listening to Arab Modernity: Commercial Recordings from the 1932 Cairo Congress” at AMS. She also served on the organizing committee for the 13th Annual UNC-KCL Graduate Student Music Conference, held at UNC in May.
Justin Frankeny is conducting dissertation research in Miami in June and July using funds from the Society for American Music’s Cone Fellowship and the University of Miami’s Goizueta Fellowship. During the 23-24 academic year he served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music History at Baldwin Wallace University, teaching 12 credits in the fall and 12 in the spring. He also presented at the fall 2023 meeting of the Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society and participated in the UNC Online Course Development Support Program facilitated by Digital and Lifelong Learning for his UNC Summer School Course, MUSC 143: Intro to Rock, which is underway now! Justin has been hired to teach 3 courses in music history and music appreciation at Duquesne University this fall.
Kira Gaillard presented “The Enemy Without: Blitzstein’s Reuben Reuben, Silence, and Biopolitics” at AMS. She received a FLAS fellowship to study Arabic at the Qasid Institute in Amman, Jordan this summer. The fellowship was awarded by the Center for Middle East & Islamic Studies (CMEIS) and is funded through the US Department of Education.
ken tianyuan Ge presented “Ungrading Jazz: Listening and Writing as Decolonial Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Jazz History Survey” at AMS. This year, he traveled to South Florida, is now conducting research in the UK and Denmark through the early summer, and will continue research in the Philippines going into the fall. This spring he was the recipient of the Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, and in June is presenting research at the International Tourism & Leisure Studies Conference in Liverpool, as well as the Royster Global ’24 Conference in London.
Joshua Harton was elected student representative for the AMS-SE chapter alongside Destiny Meadows.
Emily Hynes completed her Ph.D. this spring with her dissertation “The Legacy of Incarceration: How Prison Music Became a Commodity in the Popular Music Industry” under the advisement of Jocelyn Neal.
Eden Jones is teaching Intro to Rock this summer at Orange Correctional Center as part of UNC’s correctional education program.
Tara Jordan served on the organizing committee for the 13th Annual UNC-KCL Graduate Student Music Conference, held at UNC in May. She also completed her Ph.D. this spring with her dissertation “‘Mi, Monastir’: Remembrance and Reconstruction of Interwar Monastir’s Jewish Musical Life” under the advisement of Michael Figueroa.
Stella Li presented “‘Listen Remember and Recreate’: Jazz 101 in Occupied Japan” at AMS. She is starting a job as Associate Editor (Japanese and Korean publications) at Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) in New York City this fall.
Sarah Lindmark presented “Come Out and Dance: The Lesbian Liberation of Manhattan’s Gay Bars in the Early 1970s” at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in April. Her presentation was part of the panel, “Cruising Utopia: Queer and Feminist Community in Popular Music,” moderated by Lauron Kehrer. She was awarded the Marcia J. Citron Graduate Research in Musicology Award, which will fund research this summer for her dissertation, “From Jukebox to DJ: Dance, Desire, Technology, and Liberation in Manhattan’s Gay Bars, 1968-1974.”
Kari Lindquist was awarded the Margery Lowens Dissertation Research Fellowship by the Society for American Music. “With the support of this fellowship, I will be able to conduct archival research at the National Archives and the Band Collections in the Special Collections in Performing Arts at the University of Maryland,” wrote Kari. She also presented “Wind Bands in Cold War Diplomacy and The University of Michigan Symphony Band’s 1961 Tour” at AMS and has a book review forthcoming this June in the Music Library Association Journal, Notes. Kari will present her research at the Feminist Theory & Music Conference in late June.
Destiny Meadows presented “Aerobic Sound, Neoliberal Bodies: Fashioning the ‘New American Person’ in the US Cultural Imaginary” at AMS.
She also won two awards this Spring: The Madeleine L’Engle Travel Research Fellowship from Smith College and The Poulton Family Endowed Summer Research Fellowship from UNC. Destiny was also elected student representative for the AMS-SE chapter alongside Joshua Harton.
Briana Nave presented “Writing About Music: Valuing Women’s Subjectivity” at the Tau Beta Sigma women in music event on March 1st. She also presented “Writing From a Body: Ellen Willis’s Pro-Sex Rock Criticism” for the Harvard University Graduate Music Forum Conference on April 12; this year the theme of the conference was music criticism. Most recently, she presented “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Musical Symbolism and Health Propaganda in Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith” at the UNC-KCL joint conference in May.
Erin Pratt was awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Graduate School for this coming year, 2024-2025. She also had her paper accepted to the German Studies Association conference in Atlanta this September.
Matteo Sammartano completed his Master’s degree with his thesis “The Night Unraveled: Nocturnal Significances in Seventeenth-Century French Court Ballets” under the advisement of Anne MacNeil. He also served on the organizing committee for the 13th Annual UNC-KCL Graduate Student Music Conference, held at UNC in May.
Sierriana Terry completed her Ph.D. this Spring with her dissertation, “Harmony & Hues: Blerd Views on the Fusion of Black Culture and Japanese Animation” under the advisement of David Garcia. Dr. Terry will teach Music History courses as an adjunct professor at North Carolina Central University for both the Summer semesters and the 2024-2025 academic year.
Kendall Winter is a 2024 recipient of UNC’s Boka Hadzija Award for Distinguished University Service. Her nominators cited her years of participation and leadership in the Graduate and Professional Student Government and her contributions to the field of musicology through her teaching and research at UNC and through her engagement in national organizations as deserving of this recognition. She presented “Hegemonic Refashioning: The 1888 Song Leaflet of the American Woman Suffrage Association” at AMS. This spring, Kendall completed her Ph.D. with the dissertation “Suffragist and Antisuffragist Songs in the United States, 1867-1920” under the advisement of Annegret Fauser. Dr. Winter looks forward to starting a new chapter as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA this fall.
