Symposium on Sound and Hate Studies

Kathryn Agnes Huether is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Antisemitism Studies at UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. She earned her PhD in musicology with a minor in cultural studies from the University of Minnesota (2021) and holds a second master’s in religious studies from the University of Colorado Boulder. She has held visiting appointments at Bowdoin College and Vanderbilt University and was a 2021–2022 Mandel Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Her research examines how sound mediates Holocaust memory, antisemitism, racial violence, and contemporary politics. She has published in Sound Studies and Yuval, guest edited Sounding Out! on “Hate and NonHuman Listening,” and has forthcoming work in the Journal of the Society for American Music and Music and Politics. She has organized national scholarly initiatives, including the 2025 roundtable “Music, Silence, and Social Action in an Age of Perpetual Crisis,” and represented UCLA at the Eradicate Global Hate Summit. She is a member of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University’s Virtual Speakers Bureau and has been an invited educator at two of its regional institutes. She currently edits ISH’s public-facing blog.

Her first book, Sounding Hate: Sonic Politics in the Age of Platforms and AI, is in progress. Her second, Sounding the Holocaust in Film (Indiana University Press), is forthcoming.
 

Shayna M. Silverstein is associate professor in the Department of Performance Studies and faculty member of the Middle Eastern and North African Studies program at Northwestern University. Silverstein’s teaching and scholarship broadly examine the politics and aesthetics of sound, movement, and performance in contemporary Middle Eastern cultural production. Her first book, Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria (2024), shows how dabke dance music embodies the fraught dynamics of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationhood in an authoritarian state. Silverstein has also published an award-winning article in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and an audiography in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image, among other scholarly contributions. Her publications and research have been supported by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Program, as well as the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. Shayna received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago and her B.A. in History from Yale University.

She currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Northwestern University Press and Ethnomusicology; the Editorial Advisory Board for the Sound Studies series of Bloomsbury Press; the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Advisory Council; and she is a Co-Chair for the Society for Arab Music Research. Shayna also enjoys playing violin with Tayf Ensemble and Lakeview Orchestra in Chicago.

Amalia C. Mora is the Research Manager for the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate. She is an ethnomusicologist, writer, and performing artist whose doctoral research examined the relationship between sexual violence and narratives about lower-caste dancers in India. In addition to her position at UCLA, she is a lecturer in the online Human Rights Practice Program and an affiliated faculty member for the Applied Intercultural Arts Research Program at the University of Arizona, where she helped to establish a new master’s certificate program as well as the UA Consortium on Gender-Based Violence. Amalia received her PhD from the UCLA Herb Albert School of Music, department of Ethnomusicology. 

Allie Kelly is a first-year PhD student in Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Originally from Florida, she has spent the past decade in Los Angeles making and studying music, earning her B.A. in Music Industry Studies with a specialization in Vocal Performance from California State University, Northridge. Her research sits within voice studies, with a focus on eating disorders and their relationship to the voice. She is interested in how disordered eating reshapes vocal production and perception, and how those changes are understood across biomedical, sociocultural, digital, and everyday listening contexts.

This work is shaped by her lived experience as a singer-songwriter, including writing and recording for her own projects as well as for film, television, and other artists, and by her ongoing engagement with independent music communities. She is also interested in independent music scenes and global indie aesthetics, particularly in Spanish-speaking contexts, where she considers how vocal styling, language, and regional accent function as musical markers of identity. More broadly, her work explores how voices carry culturally specific meanings and how singers navigate listener expectations within and across scenes.