Briana M. Nave

Graduate Student (Ph.D. Candidate)

Briana M. Nave holds a Master of Arts in Music History and Literature from the University of Maryland, College Park (2019) and a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance from Salem College (2016).

She has explored topics in gender, criticism, and rock performance, specifically focusing on grunge/punk artist Courtney Love and foundational rock critic Ellen Willis. In spring 2019, her paper “Death and the Widow: Gender, Agency, and the Haunting of Hole’s Live Through This” won the Lowens Award for Best Student Paper from the Capital Chapter of the American Musicological Society. In summer 2022, she presented on Ellen Willis’s pro-sex feminist approach to musical evaluation at the Feminist Theory and Music conference at the University of Guelph.

Her current research interests concern the cultural and scientistic construction of musical talent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the intersections of music, the scientific method, and biological determinism; and musical evaluation broadly.