James Ace is a Ph.D. student in UCLA’s Department of Musicology, having previously earned a Master’s degree in Music History and Literature from the University of Maryland, College Park (2017), and a Bachelor of Music degree in viola performance from Florida State University (2015). His primary research looks at American musical entertainment of the mid-late nineteenth century in resonance with contemporary cultural and scientific formations of race, sex, and gender. James is also actively involved in a project that deals with sound, phenomenological approaches to embodiment, and martial arts. He is particularly interested in historical constructions of gender, and approaches to scholarship informed by transgender perspectives. James has also worked extensively on archival projects: as an archivist in the Special Collections in Performing Arts at the University of Maryland, and as a graduate student researcher for the Lowell Milken Fund for American Jewish Music working in collaboration with Sinai Temple in Westwood.

Morgan Bates (they/them) is a musicologist, trumpeter, educator, and Cota-Robles fellow at UCLA. Morgan’s musicological research discusses constructions of identity in a wide span of musical works, from Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer to Handel’s Alcina. Their current work assesses gender play within the multifaceted genre of drag vocal performance. Morgan’s recent paper, “Vocal Transcendance: Performing and Perceiving Transgender Drag Vocal Performance,” was featured at the 2023 American Musicological Society Conference on the historic all-transgender panel centered around “transauralities.” An active performer, Morgan is a member of UCLA’s trumpet studio and the Gay Freedom Band of Los Angeles. They have held professional positions with the Rogue Valley Symphony, the Oregon Mozart Players, the Oregon Brass Quintet, and the Eugene Difficult Music Ensemble. Additionally, Morgan is a two-time winner of Dickinson College’s Concerto Competition, placed third in the chamber division of the 2023 International Trumpet Guild’s Ryan Anthony Memorial Trumpet Competition, and serves on faculty for the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) at the Heart of Los Angeles. Morgan holds dual master’s degrees in Trumpet Performance and Musicology with a Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Oregon and a BA with Departmental Honors in Music from Dickinson College.

Xavier Viktor Brown (he/him/his) is from rural Maryland—a stone’s throw from the Appalachian trail and the Civil War Battlefields that got him interested in history. Xavier earned a BA in Music at the University of Chicago and a Master’s degree in Composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Xavier is a 4th year in the PhD program at UCLA and in addition to studying with his adviser, Mitchell Morris, has earned his Master’s degree in Musicology and is currently preparing to take his Special Fields exam on queer and trans studies, Jewish studies, and Schoenberg studies in the Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Xavier is also working with Jessica Schwartz on a Voice Studies project featuring oral histories he took within trans community. In his spare time, Xavier goes birdwatching either by himself or with his friends and has a current life list (North American) bird count of 150 birds!

Kerry Brunson is a PhD student in UCLA’s Department of Musicology. She received a BM in Saxophone Performance from Kennesaw State University (2009) and a MA in Musicology from California State University, Long Beach (2016). Her research centers on Classical music institutions, urbanization, and regional politics in the US South with a focus on post-war Atlanta. She has presented her work at conferences in the United States and Europe, including for the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and Music and the Moving Image. She is currently serving as Editor-in-Chief for ECHO: A Music-Centered Journal and was co-coordinator for the department’s 2017-18 Distinguished Lecture Series.

Additionally, Kerry is a docent for grades K-12 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles where she crafts and leads interactive musical tours of the museum’s galleries. She is also an active musician who enjoys singing and playing the oboe, English horn, and saxophone with an eclectic mix of local bands and orchestras.

Wade F. Dean is a Eugene V. Cota Robles Fellow and PhD candidate in the department of Musicology at the University of California Los Angeles. His work explores the interplay between Black vernacular music, popular and socio-political culture. Dean is completing a dissertation that analyzes mid-twentieth century live soul performances and their role in realizing, describing, and enacting alternative socio-political formations and futures within Black life.

Erin Fitzpatrick (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at UCLA, as well as a songwriter, recording artist, and producer. Her research takes an interdisciplinary, autoethnographic approach to the question of how queer rock and pop musicians make innovative use of musical technologies to convey their unique subjectivities. Her fascination with the interplay between bodies, technologies, and queerness directly inflects her incisive songwriting and cyborgic production. Erin’s work invites others to share in the pleasures of sensory experience, refuse hegemonic notions of virtuosity and canon-building, and imagine alternatives wherever possible.

Kate Hamori (she/her) is a first year PhD student in musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds master’s degrees in musicology and library science from Indiana University Bloomington. Her recent musicological work has focused on intersections of cultural trauma, girlhood, and sonic violence as mediated by popular music and sound on social media platforms. Kate’s interests in music librarianship include ethical cataloging practices, library instruction, information literacy, and social media outreach. In addition to her studies, Kate works as a library student research assistant for the UCLA music library. A pianist and soprano, Kate is an active choral singer and enjoys accompanying the occasional high school musical whenever the opportunity presents itself. In her spare time, Kate enjoys editing Wikipedia and hanging out with her two cats, Hildegard and Igor.

Emmie Head (she/her) is a PhD student in UCLA’s Department of Musicology. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Emmie’s recent academic work has focused on the ways in which intellectual property policy and developing music technologies like AI challenge and complicate conceptions of musical ownership. She is especially interested in the practical implications of intellectual property policy and its effects on music makers who are disadvantaged by the law in a myriad of ways. In addition to her work as a musicologist, Emmie teaches flute lessons on a volunteer basis to increase access to quality instrumental music education for those who are underserved in classical music communities. When not musicking, Emmie can be found baking pastries for her big Greek family or hanging with her miniature dachshunds Mr. Peabody, Dobby, and Fig Newton.

Molly Hennig (she/her) is a current PhD student of the Department of Musicology at UCLA. Molly received her Master of Arts in Historical Musicology with an Area of Specialty in Voice under the Leland Coon Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and her Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance & Music Industry at the University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh. Her current interests include haptic listening scenarios of gaming and play, deconstructions of aesthetic tropes, intertextuality in media poetics, and sites of gathering. She currently officiates on the AMS Ludomusicology Interest Group and has presented her work at the 2024 North American Conference for Video Game Music, the 2023 Music & The Internet Conference, and the 2022 Midwest Graduate Music Consortium. Alongside her scholarship Molly performs soprano voice and composes with a focus on contemporary art song, her work having featured in the 2021 Source Song Festival and 2022 NATS Composer Mentorship Program.

Jordan Hugh Sam (he/him) is a Ph.D. student in Musicology at UCLA, having previously earned a M.M. degree in Choral Conducting (CU Boulder), and a BA degree in Music (Amherst College). His primary research focuses on choral singing at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and employs techniques from linguistic anthropology and sensory ethnography to study the organization of feeling, intercorporeality, and racial identity in group singing. He is particularly interested in methodological approaches uniting creative practice and academic scholarship and explores those interests as a researcher with the UCLA Peer Lab. He is also actively involved in projects that apply queer frameworks to the study of early music and video game music. Forthcoming publications include a co-authored article on post-colonial listening practices in Pikmin 3 and a book chapter on sonic affordances for queer play in FFXV. Additionally, Jordan maintains an active interest in pedagogy, serving as the Teaching Assistant Coordinator for Writing II in UCLA’s Writing Program. He also has an active career as a collaborative pianist, choir director, and music teacher.

Kristy Martinez (she/her/they) is a 5th year Ph.D. student in the Department of Musicology. She received her Master’s in American Indian Studies and Musicology, as well as her Bachelor’s in History with a minor in Comparative Religions. She is Chicana/o/x and a Yaqui direct descendant from Sonora, Mexico, and has grown up in the San Gabriel Valley. An alto vocalist, she has played in punk bands, and has also performed choral and R&B music. Her work includes documenting the contributions of Indigenous punk rock in the Southwest, as well as looking to Mexico and other Indigenous communities. She is using interactive, D.I.Y. archival methods by creating a social media network, “Indigenous Punx Archive” to document those involved in the scenes (past and present)– with flyers, photos, videos, and interviews. This digital archive has been included in the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada and the Denver Art Museum. Martinez’s current primary research is on popular music of the San Gabriel Valley and East Los Angeles with a focus on punk, post-punk, heavy metal, emo, and various subcultural movements. Her work looks at nostalgia, venues, identity, voice, and spaces. An active scholar, she has been a keynote speaker, presenter and performer at both UCR Punk Con and UCLA, presented guest lectures for American Indian Studies and Chicano/a/x and Central American Studies, and also recently spoke at Amplifying Music in Los Angeles. Her next work will be included in the forthcoming volume Sovereign Aesthetics (2024).

Lily Shababi (she/her) is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Musicology at UCLA. She received a M.A. in Musicology from UCLA and a B.M. in Violin Performance and Music Composition from Cornish College of the Arts. Her research focuses on the relationships between voice, technology, and subjecthood that are cultivated by queer and trans musicians. Situating ethnographic methods amongst gender and technology studies, Lily demonstrates how material and practice-based approaches are essential to the research of electronic pop music. Lily has presented her work at the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society, where she received the Ingolf Dahl Award in May 2023. She is also a performer and composer of experimental electroacoustic music.

Danielle Stein is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has co-coordinated the Musicology Distinguished Lecture Series and served as Managing Editor of ECHO: A Music Centered Journal. She holds a M.A. in Musicology from UCLA, a M.M. in Voice Performance and Opera Studies from California State University Northridge, and a B.M. in Voice Performance and Education from San Diego State University. Her primary research examines World War II propaganda music, the covert musical operations of the Office of Strategic Services and the Central Intelligence Agency, and the development of weaponized music and sonic environments over the 20th and 21st centuries. Courses taught at UCLA include Music and Politics, Music as Political Instrument in the Sixties, Film and Music; courses assisted have included Popular Jewish and Israeli Music. Danielle has presented papers at the national conferences for the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, as well as at the Wagner 1900 Conference at the University of Oxford and the Transnational Opera Studies Conference at the University of Bern. She is the recipient of the American Musicological Society’s Ingolf Dahl Memorial award in musicology for her paper “The Office of Strategic Services Musac Project: ‘Lili Marleen,’ Marlene Dietrich, and the Propaganda Music of WWII,” and her research has received support from the Milken Foundation for Jewish Music, the Ciro Zoppo Research Fellowship, the UCLA Graduate Research Mentorship Program, and the University of California Del Amo Fellowship. Also a soprano, former USO performer, and an avid community arts producer, Danielle maintains a private voice studio in Hollywood and serves as the Assistant Artistic Director and Vice President of the Celestial Opera Company, is a co-founder of the California Music Collective, and serves on the board of the Émigré Composers Orchestra.

Born and raised in Southern California, Michele Yamamoto (she/her) is both a musicology scholar and a human-focused administrator within mission-driven organizations. Her research interests include the role of popular music in the development of self-identity, cultural identity, and other conceptual social frameworks. She is especially interested in arts justice and the way music and sounds enter and evolve within marginalized communities. Other research interests include politics, human geography, music and space/place, and sound studies. She holds an MA in musicology from California State University, Long Beach (2022) and a BA in Music History from UCLA (2009).