Melissa Camp

Graduate Student (Ph.D. Candidate)

Melissa Camp is a Ph.D. candidate and is originally from Arlington, Texas. She earned a Master of Music in Historical Musicology degree (2018) and a Bachelor of Music Education degree (2016) from Texas Christian University. Her dissertation project explores the introduction of the phonograph and record companies to the Eastern Mediterranean at the height of the Arab nahda during the early twentieth century. In particular, she focuses on how Arab women musicians used the recording studio as a political space to promote anticolonialism, modernity, and early Arab feminism, as well as the subsequent effects as these recordings were distributed throughout the Arab world. Her research has been supported by the American Musicological Society, US Department of Education, Middle East Studies Association, and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. In the fall of 2022, Melissa has received an Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship from the UNC Graduate School to study at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin.