Maria Sonevytsky (PhD, Ethnomusicology, 2012) has accepted the position of Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California at Berkeley, beginning July 2018.
Whitney Slaten has been appointed Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Technology at Eugene Lang College, The New School, for 2017-2018.
Shannon Garland (Ph.D., Ethnomusicology, 2014) has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA and in Brazil.
Marceline Saibou has been appointed Assistant Professor of Music at Bowdoin College.
Eben Graves, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, has published “The Marketplace of Devotional Song: Cultural Economies of Exchange in Bengali Padavali-Kirtan,” in Ethnomusicology.
The Music Department is offering a wide range of elective courses this semester. For the entire listing, please see Directory of Classes http://www.columbia.edu/cu/bulletin/uwb.
Adam Kielman (PhD, 2016) has been appointed Assistant Professor in Music at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Alumna Sara Snyder (PhD, 2016) has been appointed Assistant Professor of Anthropology & Director of the Cherokee Language Program at Western Carolina University.
The Department's annual newsletter with faculty, student, and alumni news and accomplishments of the past year is now available for download.
The Music Department is offering a wide range of elective courses this semester.
For the entire listing, please see Directory of Classes.
We warmly congratulate Dr. Marceline Saibou, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation on popular music in Togo on Friday, May 13, 2016. Dr. Saibou's dissertation was sponsored by Prof. Aaron Fox, and her committee included Profs. Alessandra Ciucci and George Lewis (Music, Columbia), and distinguished Columbia ethnomusicology alumniProf. Ryan Skinner (Music and African Studies, OSU) and Prof. Andrew Eisenberg (Music, NYU Abu Dhabi).
Congratulations Dr. Saibou!
We warmly congratulate Dr. Sara Snyder, who successfully defended her dissertation on Cherokee language translational poetics and early childhood immersion education on Friday, May 6, 2016. Her dissertation was sponsored by Prof. Aaron Fox, and her committee included Profs. Bambi Schieffelin(Anthropology, NYU), David Samuels (Music, NYU),Ana Maria Ochoa (Music, Columbia), and CU ethno alumna Prof. Amanda Minks (Anthropology, Oklahoma).
Dr. Snyder has also recently been appointed as a visiting assistant professor of anthropology and sociology at Western Carolina University in 2016-17.
The Center for Ethnomusicology's project to "repatriate" Native American recordings made by collector Laura Boulton in the 1930s and 40s and purchased by Columbia in the 1960s to their source communities has been featured as part of an extensive radio feature on BBC Radio 3 (UK). The feature includes interviews with Columbia ethnomusicologist Prof. Aaron Fox and former Columbia students Kristina Jacobsen (MA, Music, 2006, now Assistant Professor of Music at the University of New Mexico) and Nanobah Becker (MFA, Film, 2008, now a prominent, Sundance-winning Native American filmmaker). The feature runs for about 45 minutes.
Listen to it here. (Flash Player Required)
Taking It All Back Home, Sunday Feature - BBC Radio 3
(Photo: Tagiugmiut Iñupiat Dancers, Barrow Alaska, 2009; Photo by A. Fox)
The Department of Music warmly congratulates Ethnomusicology PhD Alumnus Dr. Timothy Mangin, who has been appointed Assistant Professor of Music at Boston College. Timothy Mangin completed his PhD in Ethnomusicology at Columbia in 2013. Prof. Mangin is an ethnomusicologist and musician researching the intersection of popular music, race, ethnicity, religion, and cosmopolitanism in West Africa and the African Diaspora. He has received fellowships from the Columbia University’s Center for Comparative Literature and Society, St. Lawrence University’s Department of Music, Mellon Foundation, the Foreign Language Areas Studies Program and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Abroad Program. He taught at Columbia University, New York University, St. Lawrence University, and the City University of New York. An improvisational flutist, Tim founded St. Lawrence University’s Jazz and Improv Ensemble and also studies mbira and is a member of Capoeira Brasil. His writings have appeared in the edited volumes Begegnungen: The World Meets Jazz and Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies as well as reviews in The Yearbook for Traditional Music and Ethnomusicology On-Line. Tim is working on a book examining indigenous cosmopolitanism through the intersection of the Senegalese urban dance music called mbalax and the practice of black, Wolof (the dominant ethnic group), gendered, and Muslim identities. He is also exploring blackness in Senegalese hip hop and the dynamics of improvisation in New York City’s underground hip hop and jazz scene. The Digital Humanities is a key part of Tim’s pedagogy and research that began when he worked at Columbia’s Institute for Research in African American Studies on the Malcolm X Project, under the direction Manning Marable, and further developed with students at The City College of New York. Dr. Mangin's Columbia PhD dissertation, on Senegalese mbalax, was advised by Prof. George Lewis.
The Department of Music warmly congratulates PhD alumna Dr. Lauren Flood, who has been appointed as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lauren Flood earned the Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia in 2015. She researches sound technologies and experimental instrument building practices in the contexts of the do-it-yourself ethos, maker culture, and popular and experimental music scenes. She held a Whiting Fellowship for her dissertation, “Building and Becoming: DIY Music Technology in New York and Berlin,” with fieldwork supported by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies and the National Science Foundation. Lauren’s work is situated at the nexus of music, anthropology, sound studies, and science and technology studies. She engages with dialogs on critical organology, creativity and knowledge production, histories and aesthetics of sound and recording practices, vernacular technologies and everydayness, ethics and labor in the music industry, alternative methods in science and technology education, and the contemporary sense of self as mediated through the arts.
At Columbia, she has been a teaching fellow in Music Humanities and Asian Music Humanities, the graduate assistant for the Center for Ethnomusicology, an editorial board member and reviews editor for Current Musicology, and on the organizing committee of the Columbia Music Scholarship Conference. She has presented her work at annual meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Anthropological Association, the Society for the Social Studies of Science, and the EMP Pop Conference.
Prior to her graduate studies, Lauren completed her undergraduate degree at Drexel University, with a major in music industry and a minor in anthropology. While living in Philadelphia, she studied and performed as a guitarist, worked in copyrights and licensing, and assisted with research at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. She also completed field schools in Latin American ethnomusicology and archaeology, maintaining a long-standing interest in Mesoamerica and the modern Mayan region.
Dr. Flood's Columbia PhD dissertation was advised by Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa.
Congratulations to Jenny Payne (BC 2016), a neuroscience and ethnomusicology major, for being awarded the prestigious Luce Scholarship! The Luce Scholars Program provides professional placement, in addition to language study and stipends, in Asia for American college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals. The program's goal is to "enhance the understanding of Asia among potential leaders in American society." Jenny gave an interview to the Columbia Spectator, in which she outlines her personal and professional journey and goals: read it here.
Columbia Music Scholarship Conference (CMSC) 2016
The eleventh annual Columbia Music Scholarship Conference (CMSC) will be held at Columbia University on Saturday, February 27, 2016.
CMSC is a conference organized and staffed by the graduate students of the Department of Music at Columbia University.
Keynote Speaker
Professor Alexander Rehding (Harvard University)
"Piano, Monochord, Siren: Studying Music 1999 – 1518 – 1834"
Full details at the conference website!
The Department warmly congratulates Prof. Ana Maria Ochoa (Ethnomusicology), whose new book Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Colombia (Duke University Press, 2014) has been co-awarded the prestigious Alan Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.
The Merriam Prize recognizes "the most distinguished, published English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology" of the prior two year period.