Velia Ivanova has been appointed as Visiting Assistant Professor in Musicology in the Department of Music at Wake Forest University for the 2025-2026 academic year. At Wake Forest, Velia will be teaching courses in the Music History sequence, courses in American music, as well as a variety of other courses in music.
Velia graduated with her PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia 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. 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. From Fall 2022 to Spring 2025, Velia was a Core Lecturer in Music Humanities at Columbia and also taught courses through Columbia’s Center for Justice.
