Melissa Camp

Graduate Student (Ph.D. Candidate)

Melissa Camp is a Ph.D. candidate 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. She focuses on how Arab women musicians used the recording studio as a political space to promote anticolonialism, modernity, and early Arab feminism, and she analyzes the recordings’ subsequent effects as they were distributed throughout the Arab world. Her research has been supported by the American Musicological Society, US Department of Education, US State Department, and the Middle East Studies Association. Since receiving candidacy, Melissa has conducted research in Boston, London, Berlin, Cairo, and Paris, and she has presented at the Annual Meetings for the Society for Ethnomusicology and the American Musicological Society.