Tara Jordan

Graduate Student (Ph.D. Candidate)

Tara Jordan is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology and holds a Bachelor of Music in flute performance from Furman University and a Master of Music in musicology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her dissertation, entitled “Mi Monastir: Remembrance and Reconstruction of Interwar Monastir’s Jewish Musical Life,” examines the role that music played in the cultural life of the Monastirli Jewish community from 1912 until 1943 through a combination of archival and oral historical approaches, collected from archives and communities throughout the United States and Israel. In studying a community destroyed by the Holocaust, the project seeks to recover the cultural life of Monastir (now known as Bitola) through music, revealing larger linguistic, religious, and secular trends of this formerly thriving Sephardic Jewish center. Her research has been supported by the American Musicological Society and the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies.

Prior to her dissertation work on twentieth-century Sephardic musics, Tara studied the sacred music of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and completed a Masters thesis at UNC entitled “Mobilizing Mary: Eleonora Gonzaga’s Religious and Political Influence as Shown in Two Settings of a Pianto Della Madonna.” Tara has presented papers at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society’s South-Central Chapter meeting (March 2018), the University of Cincinnati’s Musicology and Music Theory Society’s Biennial Student Conference (April 2018), the Newberry Library’s Graduate Student Conference (January 2019), and the South Central Graduate Music Consortium (September 2020).