Joel Crotty is Associate Dean (Graduate Research) in the Faculty of Arts, Monash University. His research areas are twentieth- and twenty-first-century Romanian and Australian classical music and he has facilitated a number of creative exchanges between composers in Romania and musicians in Australia.

Kay Dreyfus is a research officer in the School of Music–Conservatorium and a graduate student in the School of Historical Studies, Monash University. She has a particular interest in everyday musical experience in Australia, and her publications include Sweethearts of Rhythm: The Story of Australia’s All-Girl Bands and Orchestras to the End of the Second World War (1999).

Prof. DSc. Claire Levy works in the Music Department of the Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She is author of the books Dialogichnata muzika: blusat, populjarnata kultura, mitovete na modernostta [Dialogical Music: Blues, Popular Culture and the Myths of Modernity] (Sofia: BAN – Institute of Art Studies, 2005) and Ethnojazat: lokalni proekzii v globalnoto selo [Ethnojazz: Local Prospects in the Global Village] (Sofia: BAN – Institute of Art Studies, 2007), of numerous articles and book chapters (in Bulgarian and English) on a variety of popular music issues, as well as entries for the Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World.

Renata Pasternak-Mazur graduated from the Jagiellonian University of Krakow (MA in musicology) and is currently a Graduate Fellow at Rutgers University. She specializes in twentieth century and contemporary music and is writing her dissertation on Polish post-socialist music seen through the lens of musical phenomena that came into prominence after socialism collapsed but are perceived as controversial, undesired, shameful, and even dangerous.

Nino Tsitsishvili is an honorary research fellow at the School of Music/Conservatorium at Monash University, Melbourne, where she graduated PhD in 2005 with her thesis National Unity and Gender Difference in Georgian Traditional Song-Culture: Ideologies and Practices. Her area of specialization is Georgian traditional polyphonic singing, popular music genres, Georgian rock, folk-jazz fusion, and rap, and concerns topics such as language ideologies and their influence on the development of modern Georgian popular music styles, ideologies of gender and nationalism, ethnic relations and political philosophies.

Julie Waters is undertaking a doctorate in musicology at Monash University. Her thesis examines Alan Bush’s first three symphonies against the background of his Marxist beliefs. She holds an honors degree in music from Monash University, as well as degrees in law and arts (including a Masters degree) from the University of Melbourne.