I am a historian of music and culture with a focus on the postwar United States. I received my PhD in music history and literature from the University of California, Berkeley and my AB from Harvard College. Before completing my PhD, I studied voice at the New England Conservatory, received a Fulbright grant to study singing in Paris, was a National Semi-Finalist in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, and performed solo roles with the Houston Grand Opera, Washington National Opera, and other companies. My performance background has made me particularly interested in the lived experience of music. I try to understand and teach my students, in ethnomusicologist Bonnie Wade’s words, “how people make music meaningful in their lives.” As a specialist in recent US history, I aim especially to help Americans understand how the present came to be.

I teach courses in the history of music from the medieval era to the present. I also advise DMA and musicology PhD and MA students. I am currently serving a second three-year term on the Faculty Senate of the University of Rochester.

In my research, I study how and why people made music in order to understand broader trends in cultural and political history. My primary focus is on the postwar United States. I have also published research on Belle Epoque France.

My book, Self-Realization Nation: How Performing Artists Taught Americans to Be Themselves, Together, will be published by the University of California Press in spring 2026. This book tells the story of a group of musicians, dancers, and actors who embraced the ideal of self-realization in the postwar United States. They were rich and poor, queer and straight, white and people of color. Some are household names, like saxophonists Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, composers John Cage and John Adams, and guitarist Jerry Garcia; others, cult figures, like dancers Al Huang and Anna Halprin, the improviser Joseph Jarman, and the actor Viola Spolin; still others have largely been forgotten. They specialized in everything from improvisatory theater and modern dance to rock, jazz, and classical music. They were composers, choreographers, performers, and educators. What united them was an audacious, even inflammatory idea: that they could use their arts to realize their true selves and, most importantly, help others do the same. Self-realization, to them, meant letting go of limiting beliefs, subverting oppressive social norms, and creating a new America where everyone was free to be themselves, together. In the book, I call their movement the “creative counterculture.”

My research on this and other topics is published or forthcoming in the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the Society for American Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Grove Music Online. My most recent article, “Historicizing the Discourse of Postmodernism in Music: Eric Salzman, Counterculture, and the Birth of an Idea,” will be published in the Journal of Musicology in winter 2026.

I am currently writing a second book entitled How Broadway Learned to Belt. Belting is a style of singing characterized by a piercing vocal sound, especially in the upper range. Sometimes called the “Broadway belt,” the style is widely regarded as a quintessential feature of the US musical theater tradition. The book answers the question, How and why did Broadway singers come to “belt”? Most historians assume that “belting” originated early on in Broadway history with singers like Ethel Merman (1908–1984). In fact, however, the terms “belt” and “belting” were not coined until the 1950s, in the midst of the Cold War. The book sheds new light on how Americans used music to promote Cold War ideas about genre, race, gender, and American identity in ways that continue to shape musical life today.