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.