Music & Politics
Volume 19
Spring 2025
James Davis is a scholar based in London, UK. He has written on music, politics, theory and philosophy.
Danielle Fosler-Lussier is Professor of Music at the Ohio State University, where she was recently named a University Distinguished Scholar. Her interests include global mobility, music diplomacy, and institutional histories of music. Thanks to a grant from the TOME initiative, her most recent book, Music on the Move, is freely available (open access) from the University of Michigan Press. She is an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society.
Angelina Gibson is a PhD student in historical musicology at the University of Michigan and has served as the Assistant Editor of Music & Politics since 2023. Additionally, she is an Editorial Assistant for Music of the United States of America and Research Assistant for Rhiannon Giddens’ U-M artistic residency. Her research concerns the history and present state of Asian Americans in classical and contemporary ballet, with a particular focus upon choreomusicological analysis of classical ballets and works by the Asian American Ballet Project.
Chaeyoung Lee, PhD, is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the history and practices of performing arts on the Korean peninsula. Her current project, The Cold War and the Musical Divergence of Korea, builds on her dissertation, “Music and Freedom Across the Border,” which explores how North Korean defector musicians engage with diverse musical genres in South Korea’s market-driven society. Her research highlights both the freedoms and limitations these musicians encounter within neoliberal and state-sponsored frameworks. In addition to her academic work, Chaeyoung is a composer and performer of traditional Korean music, specializing in the geomungo, a six-stringed zither.
Janina Müller received her PhD in Historical Musicology from Humboldt University of Berlin in 2019, with a dissertation on film noir music. After having worked at the Chair for Historical Musicology from 2015 to 2018, she was awarded a Walter Benjamin Fellowship from the German Research Foundation and a Junior Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) for her project “Radio Plays Politics: Musical Avant-garde and 1968 Radio Culture” for a funding period of three years (October 2020–September 2023) at KU Leuven in Belgium. Furthermore, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Music Department of the University of Chicago for the Autumn quarter of 2022. She currently holds an interim professorship at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research explores the intersection of music/sound and media across genres in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Marianna Ritchey is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Ritchey’s book, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (U. Chicago Press, 2019), examines classical music and capitalist ideologies in the contemporary United States. She is currently working on an array of topics having to do with music and political imagining.
Jillian C. Rogers is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Florida. She studies relationships between music, sound, and trauma in various historical, cultural, and contemporary contexts. Jill is the author of Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Her work on music and trauma, sound studies, and French music has appeared in Transposition, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Music & Letters, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
Dr. Mathew Tembo is an accomplished music performer, educator and scholar. He graduated with a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Pittsburgh, PA in 2024. His research focuses on shifts in musical labor and musical production in Zambia's home studios. He is a lecturer of music at the Copperbelt University. He is currently the chair of the Arts and Musicology Department at the same university.
Anna Valcour is a doctoral candidate in musicology at Brandeis University and a former opera singer. She served as an Assistant Professor of Practice at Southern Illinois University (Carbondale) and will be an adjunct at Murray State University Fall 2025. Her research focuses on the intersection of power dynamics and systems of oppression and how they manifest in the voice and singers’ lived experiences. Recently, Anna was awarded the AMS New England Chapter Schafer Memorial Award.