Paul David Flood (he/him) is a musicologist studying migration and globalization, with a specialization in contemporary European popular music, cultural history, and politics. He is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology at the Eastman School of Music. His dissertation, titled “‘United By Music’: Europeanism, Migration, and Belonging through the Eurovision Song Contest, 1990-2024,” explores how members of Europe’s migrant and mobile communities have engaged with Eurovision in ways that complicate notions of European identity developed through European integration. He has presented his work at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the Council for European Studies. He is a recipient of the David Sanjek Student Paper Prize from IASPM-US (2024), the Presser Graduate Music Award from the Presser Foundation (2024), and both the Charles Warren Fox Award for Excellence in Musicological Research and the Elsa T. Johnson Fellowship in Musicology from the Eastman School of Music (2025). His academic writing is published and forthcoming in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of the American Musicological Society, and Scandinavian Studies. He is currently guest co-editing a forthcoming (2027) special issue of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture on “Global Queer/Trans Nightlives” alongside Alejandrina M. Medina and Christina Misaki Nikitin. As a public musicologist, Paul has discussed his research on major North American news outlets including NPR and The Globe and Mail, and he has written for VAN Magazine and I Care If You Listen. In the classroom, Paul combines rigorous critical thinking with an ethic of care through targeted assignments and class discussions that challenge students to work collaboratively to critique how systemic power structures shape historical narratives and musical institutions. He was awarded the University of Rochester’s Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student in 2024.

Paul has held service positions on the IASPM-US Executive Committee and on the Eastman School of Music’s Graduate Musicology Association. In Spring 2024, he served as a Visiting Scholar at Malmö University in Malmö, Sweden. He earned his MFA in Musicology from the University of California, Irvine and his BA in Music from Westminster Choir College. Outside of his scholarship, Paul can be found singing with professional chamber choirs throughout the Western New York region; playing JRPGs; and petting his cat, Stewie.

pflood@u.rochester.edu