Molly Hennig

Molly Hennig (she/her) is a third-year doctoral student of the Department of Musicology at UCLA. She holds a Bachelor of Music in vocal performance and music industry from the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh and received her Master of Arts in historical musicology at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Molly’s current interests involve humor as musical discourse, particularly concerning sound studies in online livestreaming, neurodivergence in gaming and play, and narratives of childhood entertainment. Her ongoing project, “Gathering and Listening on Twitch,” received the Keck Humanistic Inquiry Fellowship and has featured at the North American Conference on Video Game Music, the European Conference on Video Game Music and Sound, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. Additionally, her presentation on “opera for babies”featured at the Transnational Opera Studies Conference and received the Ingolf Dahl Award from the AMS Pacific-Southwest Chapter. She currently works under the Graduate Student Research Mentorship for her project on neurodivergent listening and video game soundtracks, and her presentation on the trans-medial music of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise will feature at the 2025 AMS/SMT Joint Annual Meeting. Alongside her scholarship, Molly performs soprano voice and composes with a focus on contemporary art song and chamber music, her work having premiered at the 2021 Source Song Festival, the 2022 Minneapolis “songSLAM” with Sparks & Wiry Cries, and the 2022 Composer Mentorship Program under the National Association of Teachers of Singing and Cincinnati Song Initiative.