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.

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 of Music at Columbia is pleased to announce the publication of our 2015-16 Newsletter, which documents the extraordinary range of activities and accomplishments in our community over the last year.

The Columbia Music Scholarship Conference invites graduate students and recent Ph.D. recipients to submit abstracts to be selected for presentation at our eleventh annual meeting on February 27, 2016 at Columbia University in New York. The theme of the 2016 meeting will be Listening. We are pleased to announce that the conference will feature a keynote address by Alexander Rehding (Harvard University).

CFP Deadline: January 5, 2016.

We seek papers that engage with topics including, but not limited to, the following:

--Mediated Listening: How have technologies shaped listening practices and how have practices of listening shaped technologies?
--Sound: Toxic or Curative?: How have medical, physiological, and psychological discoveries affected the way listening is understood? How have practitioners in these fields studied listening and hearing?
--(In)Active Listening: How might states of mind affect listening? How does space influence listening practice and musical performance?
--Listening In: How can listening be used as a mode of surveillance and control? How does ethics factor into listening?
--Constructed Listeners: Who are the assumed listeners in music scholarship? Whose identities are excluded? How are these exclusions perpetuated by different types of music, sound, or noise?
--Pedagogy: In what ways have educational institutions impacted the practices of listening? How do pedagogical approaches “cultivate” listeners?

We are soliciting proposals for twenty-minute presentations from scholars active in all music disciplines as well as from scholars in related fields, aiming to maximize the theoretical and methodological breadth of the discussion.

Please submit abstracts of 200 to 250 words to 2016cmsc [at] gmail.com by January 5, 2016. Please include your name and contact information in your e-mail only, and attach the abstract as a Word, text, or .pdf file. The committee will select papers anonymously. All scholars who submit abstracts will be notified of the committee's decision by January 20th. For more information on the conference, please visit the conference website.

Congratulations to Columbia ethnomusicology PhD student Kevin Holt, who has been awarded a 2013 Predoctoral Fellowship from the Ford Foundation. This fellowship, which provides three years of full support for doctoral research, is sponsored by the Ford Foundation and administered by the National Research Council of the National Academies. Mr. Holt's selection for this prestigious award reflects Ford Foundation's panelists’ "judgment of scholarly competence as well as the promise of future achievement as a scholar, researcher, and teacher."