Music & Politics

Volume 13, Number 1

Winter 2019

Benjamin Tausig is Assistant Professor of Music at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on sound, music, and political protest in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. His first book, Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

Maria Sonevytsky is Assistant Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology) at the University of California, Berkeley. Recent works include an article on Crimean Tatar radio in Public Culture, a chapter on indigenous silence in Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense, and a collaborative album titled “The Chornobyl Songs Project: Living Culture from a Lost World,” released on Smithsonian Folkways. Her first book, Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in late 2019. www.mariasonevytsky.com

Shayna Silverstein is Assistant Professor in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Her research examines the politics and aesthetics of sound and movement in the contemporary Middle East, focusing on the Syrian dance music known as dabke. Her recent and upcoming publications include a chapter in Remapping Sound Studies and an audiography, Syrian Bodies, Sonic Ruptures, for a special issue of In-Transition. Her current book project, entitled Syria Moves: Performance, Politics, and Belonging in Syrian Dance Music, analyzes body, performance, and culture in prewar and wartime Syria.

Benjamin J. Harbert is Associate Professor of Music at Georgetown University. He is also a member of the American Studies, Anthropology, and Film and Media Studies departments. He is the author of American Music Documentary: Five Case Studies of Ciné-Ethnomusicology (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), producer and director of Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians (Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 2013), and co-editor of The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). 

Noriko Manabe is Associate Professor of Music Studies at Temple University. Her monograph, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Protest Music After Fukushima (Oxford 2015), won the John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Book Award, and Honorable Mention for the Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology. She is currently writing her second monograph, Revolution Remixed: Intertextuality in Protest Music, and co-editing the volumes, Nuclear Music (with Jessica Schwartz) and Oxford Handbook of Protest Music (with Eric Drott), all under contract with Oxford University Press.

Aaron Ziegel is Assistant Professor of Music History and Culture at Towson University, where he teaches courses on Western art music, American music, and opera. Much of his research examines the output of opera composers in the United States during the early decades of the 20th century. His published scholarship also explores issues in music history pedagogy, the popular songs and art music of Vernon Duke, the World War I activities of Arthur Nevin, and analyses of film scores by Georges Auric, Philip Glass, and Chris Bacon.

Donna Lee Kwon is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Music in Korea: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, published as part of the Global Music Series (Oxford University Press, 2011). Her research interests include North and South Korean music, East Asian and Asian American popular and creative music, gender and the body, issues of space and place, issues of politics and cultural heritage, and ecomusicology. Many of these interests are addressed in her second book in progress, entitled Stepping in the Madang: Embodying Space and Place in Korean Drumming and Dance.

Katherine M. Leo is Assistant Professor of Music at Millikin University. Holding a PhD in Musicology and a JD from The Ohio State University, her research explores the intersection of American legal and music histories, with specific emphasis on twentieth-century popular musics. Katherine has recently published in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy and Darmstadt Studies in Jazz Research.