Anastassiya Andrianova is an Associate Professor of English at North Dakota State University in Fargo, North Dakota. She holds an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the City University of New York, with a specialty in British and European literature and philosophy of the long nineteenth century. As a cultural critic, literary scholar, ecofeminist, and vegan, Dr. Andrianova is committed to introducing ecofeminism, animal studies, and disability studies to Ukrainian and Russian literatures in particular, where these theoretical concerns are underrepresented. Her articles have appeared in such venues as Modern Drama, Society & Animals, Disability Studies Quarterly, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, and Translation and Literature. Since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022, she has been working on Ukrainian popular antiwar music and culture, focusing on the depiction of nature and the environment, gender, and disability through multimodal discourse analyses of mainstream as well as fringe, amateur productions. This research interest, along with her antiwar advocacy, grows out of her experiences as a Ukrainian-American, classically-trained pianist and bass player, whose older sibling and friends were instrumental in building the hardcore and metal scene in post-independence Ukraine in the early 1990s.
Nick Braae is Principal Academic Staff Member in Music and Performing Arts at Wintec | Te Pūkenga. He has published widely on the music of Queen, culminating in the monograph Rock and Rhapsodies (OUP, 2021). His other research interests include the analysis of popular songs, style and genre, and musical theatre. The latter shapes his frequent work as a Musical Director with recent productions including an international production of Shrek, and New Zealand productions of Grease, Madagascar, and We Will Rock You; he has also composed scores for three original musicals.
Ian MacMillen holds a PhD in Anthropology of Music from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently Lecturer in Music and in Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies (REEES) at Yale University. He also serves as program manager for REEESNe, a Yale-based network supporting undergraduate and graduate education in REEES fields across the northeast. His scholarship, which focuses on music's political and affective dimensions in diverse post-conflict societies of Central and Southeast Europe, includes his book Playing It Dangerously: Tambura Bands, Race, and Affective Block in Croatia and Its Intimates (Wesleyan, 2019). He is also the lead creator and administrator of the Romani oral history and music archive A Storied People at the Oberlin Conservatory Library.
Alex Stevenson is Course Director for the BA (Hons) Music Performance and Production and BA (Hons) Music Industries Management courses in the Leeds School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University, where he predominately teaches modules in creative studio production, production analysis, and mixing practice. He is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy and member of the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production. Alex has published and presented on topics related to UK Hip Hop, Popular Music Education, Mixing Practice, Music Performance, and Electronic Music. He is currently undertaking a PhD in Musicology at the University of Oslo exploring the performance of machine aesthetics in popular music. Alex also has experience as a freelance musician, producer and engineer, and has worked with a number of British hip hop artists including Shameless, Low Key and Plan B, and record labels including All City Records and DAT sound. He has performed for live radio broadcast for XFM and BBC Radio 1 at Maida Vale Studios and performed at venues across the UK.
Felix Christian Thiesen is Interim Professor of Systematic Musicology in the Institute of Music and Musicology at TU Dortmund University. Before holding the same position at the University of Cologne, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Media and Business Communication, University of Würzburg (JMU). In addition to quantitative empirical research in music psychology, his interests lie in the reception and effects of intramusical (form, production, lyrics) and extramusical aspects (context, staging, artist persona) of popular music. His previous work comprises psychological experiments, uses and gratifications studies, content and corpus analyses, as well as methodological contributions. Thiesen was awarded the dissertation prize of the German Musicological Society in 2021 for his doctoral thesis on the recognition of very short musical objects (Plinks) which he completed at Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. Since 2022, he has been Secretary of the German Society for Music Psychology.
