Current Students

Paul David Flood holds a B.A. in Music from Westminster Choir College and a M.F.A. in Musicology from the University of California, Irvine. His Master’s thesis, titled Embracing the Outsider: Framing Conflict in Per Nørgård’s Wölfli Works, won a Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship from UC Irvine’s Graduate Division. Paul’s research focuses on intersections of compositional aesthetics with national identity in post-1945 avant garde music on the peripheries of Western and Central Europe, with a particular interest in the Nordic countries. He is an active choral singer and is passionate about the Eurovision Song Contest.

Celeste Stonebraker holds a B.M. in Piano Performance from Baldwin Wallace University. While at Baldwin Wallace, Celeste pursued a research project with the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, investigating historical audiences at their Bach Festival. She is interested in researching exoticism in film and video game music.

Nick Anderson holds a B.S. in Astronomy/Physics and a B.A. in Music from the University of Virginia. His research interests include vaporwave and future funk, Japanese popular music, and relationships between music, science, and the internet. Nick received the 2021 Jerald C. Graue Fellowship for his translation and commentary on the motet Reverenter Veneremur/Venerandum Crucis Lignum.

Lauren Ganger graduated summa cum laude from Mercyhurst University in 2020 with a B.A. in English and music (voice) and a minor in philosophy. Upon graduation, she was the Arts recipient of the President’s Award for Excellence in the Hafenmaier College of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences. She served as the Arts & Entertainment editor of the Merciad, Mercyhurst’s student-run newspaper, in her junior and senior years. Her research interests include intertextuality between literature and music, musical adaptations of literature, the portrayal of music in literature, and text-music relationships.

Lauren Berlin graduated with a BA in Philosophy and History of Math and Science from St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD. There she wrote her thesis entitled Unbewußt, Höchste Lust: On the Experience of Resolution in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, for which she received the Susan Irene Roberts prize for the best senior thesis. Lauren’s current research focuses on TV diplomacy and televised musical acts as a performance of American identity in the postwar period. Her other research interests include aesthetics and phenomenology in 19th century music and 20th century multimedia.

Eleanor Price graduated summa cum laude from DePauw University in 2017 with a dual BM and BA in flute performance and English literature. She has worked as a Graduate Fellow at the Prindle Institute for Ethics, serving as the editor of the national ethics news publication The Prindle Post and as a co-producer of the ethics podcast Examining Ethics. As an Honor Scholar, Eleanor completed a year-long undergraduate thesis entitled The Art of Borrowing: Intertextuality in the French Motet of the Late Middle Ages. Her research interests include questions of genre, authorship, and temporality in the Middle Ages.

Ryan Blakeley holds a B.Sc. in Biomedical Sciences and an M.A. in Music from the University of Ottawa, Canada. His Master’s thesis is titled Genre and Influence: Tracing the Lineage of Timbre and Form in Steven Wilson’s Progressive Rock. Ryan’s doctoral research explores how music streaming is affecting music industries, creative practices, and listening habits. His other research interests include popular music analysis, genre fusion, and the boundaries between high art and low art.

Miles Greenberg is a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology. Miles holds a Bachelor of Music in Music History and Piano from Temple University and a Master of Arts in Historical Musicology from the Eastman School of Music. His current research interests involve 17th Century Italian vocal music and pre-enlightenment theories of voice and vocal materiality. He is grateful to have his degree funded by the Cuyler Scholarship.

Bronwen McVeigh holds degrees in piano performance and composition from Michigan State University, where she was also honored as the class of 2017’s most outstanding graduating senior. Additionally, Bronwen is a recipient of the Sudler prize for excellence in the arts and the first prize winner of the Mary Anderson Award for Best Undergraduate Paper (MSU department of Sociology). In 2016, a grant from the Presser foundation supported Italian language study and independent research about contemporary Italian poetry and music. In addition to a PhD in musicology, Bronwen is pursuing an M.S in Medical Humanities and Bioethics. Her research interests include musical hypnosis in the gothic novel and musical activity in Occupied Paris (1940-1945).

Emmalouise St. Amand holds a B.M. in Performance and Music Education from Ithaca College and an M.M. in Voice Performance from the Frost School of Music at the University at Miami. Her research interests include issues of embodiment, voice, and popular music. Her dissertation will explore amateur and semi-professional girl groups in the 1950s and 60s. Her paper “Listening in Lycra: Jazzercise Records and the Race of the Slender Body” recently won the Graduate Student Paper Prize from the AMS New York-St. Lawrence Chapter. Emmalouise maintains a voice studio at the Eastman Community Music School.

Stephen Johnson received his B.M. in Music Education and M.A. in Musicology from Indiana University. His dissertation discusses North Korean revolutionary opera and the ways it both constructs and responds to juche ideology across the twentieth century. He has presented on the topic at the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for Music Theory, and the New York Conference on Asian Studies. When he is not researching, he is an active public musicologist, hosting musical programming on Classical 91.5 and running an award-winning musicological web series. His research has been supported by a Sproull Fellowship and professional development funding from the Eastman School, and he is currently a Raymond N. Ball Dissertation Fellow.

Anthony LaLena holds a B.M. from The State University of New York at Fredonia and a M.M. from the Manhattan School of Music in classical guitar performance. He is currently enrolled in both the D.M.A. and Ph.D. programs at the Eastman School of Music. His research interests include music and politics in early 20th century Spain, the aesthetics of fascism, and negotiations of national identity through music. As an active guitarist and chamber musician he has performed at home in New York as well as in France, Spain and Germany.

Pallas Catenella Riedler received her B.A. in Music and English Literature from Wellesley College in 2017. At Eastman, she is pursuing an M.A. in Ethnomusicology and Ph.D. in Historical Musicology. Her master’s thesis, Synthesizing Archives of the Sea: Nautical Identity in the Maritime Music Collection, examines the social and historical impacts of nautical preservation during the late-nineteenth-century decline of deep-water sailing culture. This project is supported by fellowships from the Mystic Seaport Museum and Society for American Music. Pallas’s doctoral work focuses on virtuality and immersive technology in nineteenth-century opera.

Suraj Saifullah earned a B.A. in Music (with a concentration in Theory) and a B.S. in Chemistry from Case Western Reserve University. While at CWRU, he completed his undergraduate thesis on multimedia metaphor, Nature, Technology, and Metaphor in Björk’s Biophilia (2011) and Vulnicura (2015). At previous conferences, Suraj has presented on the relationship between routes of circulation and musical practice, especially as this relationship manifests on new multimedia platforms and social networks. His dissertation investigates how this relationship informs ways that people navigate presentations of gender, sexuality, and other forms of identity. A founding member of Eastman’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Student-Faculty Alliance, Suraj is dedicated to promoting equity within academia. Suraj’s doctoral research is supported by the University of Rochester’s Provost Fellowship.

Trevor Nelson (He/Him) is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology and Sproull Fellow. His dissertation, Sounding Commonwealth: Music as Geopolitical Pedagogy in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain, explores how music shaped notions of Britishness in the wake of imperial decline. Additional research interests include educational radio history and global music history; his study of music in colonial Bombay was published in Ethnomusicology Review. Trevor is a celebrated pedagogue, having won the 2019 UR Curtis Award and 2017 Eastman TA Prize. He is dedicated to equity and access in music education; Trevor served on the Eastman Action Commission for Racial Justice and taught a pop music history course at a prison in western New York. Trevor holds degrees from Appalachian State University and Michigan State University, and currently works as an Academic Advisor at the University of Rochester’s College Center for Advising Services. Trevor.Nelson@rochester.edu

Mary McArthur received her B.M. in Piano Performance and Philosophy from Furman University and her M.A. in Ethnomusicology from Eastman. Her master’s thesis, The Beating Heart of Bali: Contemporary Resonances of the “Great Gong,” examines the gong as a rich signifier within the Balinese contemporary music scene. Mary remains an active member of Eastman’s Gamelan Sanjiwani while pursuing her Ph.D. in Historical Musicology. She is currently writing her dissertation on Carolina beach music, a regional tradition native to her home state of South Carolina. Examining beach music within a system of state heritage construction, she is particularly interested in how sounds function in dialogue with ecological processes and cultural memory to create a sense of place. mmcarth2@u.rochester.edu

Austin Richey is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at Eastman School of Music. His dissertation research is based in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan, where he is exploring the resonances between diasporic African musical, dance, and visual arts and Detroit-specific musical genres, such as Motown and techno. Richey has published original research in African Music, Opioid Aesthetics: Expressive Culture in an Age of Addiction, Sonic Signatures: How Migrant Music Constitutes the City at Night (forthcoming), as well as publicly-oriented research and writing for the award-winning PBS Digital Studios program Sound Field. Support for his work has come from the Frederick Douglass Institute, Humanities New York, the Society for American Music, and the Presser Foundation. Richey is an active musician in the New York and Detroit area, and is co-founder of Serevende Mbira and Sansifanyi Drum and Dance Company.

Richey’s public humanities project, Detroit Grooves (instagram.com/detroit_grooves), is a virtual series that connects young musicians with musical mentors and community leaders who call Detroit’s North End neighborhood home. Further, this project positions the North End as a crucial space of black American musical expression at home and abroad, and considers the impact of neighborhood residents and performers such as John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, P-Funk, Drexciya, Dej Loaf, and Onyx Ashanti.

Julia Egan holds a B.M. in Classical Guitar Performance from the Eastman School of Music. In 2016, she received a World Music Certificate upon completion of her independent study on Zimbabwean Mbira music as part of the Musical Arts Major. She has worked as a research assistant transcribing the Zimbabwean guitar songs of Sekuru Tute Wincil Chigamba for Jennifer Kyker’s (PhD) digital humanities project Sekuru’s Stories: Telling ‘Sekuru’s Stories’ Through Music. She has also performed in several invited lectures on Zimbabwean mbira music at the University of Rochester (‘16), and Nazareth College (‘18). Julia’s research interests focus on music, gender, and social change of the nomadic Tuareg people in the Sahel.

Shiyu Tu holds a B.M. in erhu performance from China Conservatory of Music in 2019. She has learned Chinese traditional music for fifteen years and possessed a high skill of erhu performance. She is pursuing an M.A. in Ethnomusicology at Eastman School of Music. Shiyu’s scholarly interests include the mediation of music in the cross-cultural field, Chinese hip-hop, and Chinese traditional music. She intends to conduct the fieldwork of Chinese hip-hop music in Beijing this summer for her MA thesis.

Eva (Yi) Yang graduated from Wheaton College (MA) with a B.A. in Economics and Music. During her time at Wheaton, she completed her research papers entitled Chinese Music During the Cultural Revolution and In the Shadow of Globalization: Sex Workers in China. She plays both traditional Chinese and Western musical instruments including dizi and piano. Her research interests include Chinese pop and traditional music associated with minority ethnic groups, cultural identity and nationalism, religion, media, gender studies, and globalization. Her current project at Eastman focuses on the music of minority ethnic groups in Yunnan Province, southwestern China.