Velia T. Ivanova

Velia Ivanova is a Core Lecturer in Music Humanities at Columbia, where she also completed her PhD in 2021. Her current book project, Encountering Incarceration Musically, traces how perceptions of the carceral system have been shaped by music recorded in U.S. prisons. 

Encountering Incarceration Musically builds on Velia’s dissertation, “The Musical Heritage of Incarceration: The Curation, Dissemination, and Management of the Lomax Collection Prison Songs,” which examined recordings of Black incarcerated men collected by the folklorists John and Alan Lomax in the U.S. South from the 1930s to the 1950s. Her work on this topic has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music and has been supported by the Jon B. Lovelace Fellowship (Library of Congress), the Margery Lowens Dissertation Research Fellowship (Society of American Music), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Prior to being a Core Lecturer, Velia was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. She also taught classes at Montclair State University and Fordham University. More recently, Velia has taught at the Taconic Correctional Facility, the Bedford Correctional Facility, and the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn through the Prison Education Project at Columbia’s Center for Justice.