Joseph Auner is Professor of Music and Dean of Academic Affairs at Tufts University. Recent and forthcoming publications include Music in the 20th and 21st Centuries, Vol. 6 (Western Music in Context: A Norton History), ‘Wanted Dead and Alive: Historical Performance Practice and Electro-Acoustic Music from Abbey Road to IRCAM’, ‘Losing Your Voice: Sampled Speech and Song from the Uncanny to the Unremarkable’, ‘Weighing, Measuring, Embalming Tonality’, and ‘The Stopped Clock: Some Moments in Tonality and Technology Since 1950’.
Andrea F. Bohlman is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her monograph in preparation, a study of political action and music in late twentieth-century Poland, asserts a place for music and sound in the cultural history of East Central Europe. She has also published extensively on music and protest, the composer Hanns Eisler, and popular music in Europe – from legion songs to the anthems of the Eurovision Song Contest.
Beau Bothwell is Assistant Professor of Music at Kalamazoo College, where he teaches courses across ethnomusicology, music theory, and history. He completed his doctorate in musicology at Columbia University in 2013, with a dissertation entitled ‘Song, State, Sawa: Music and Political Radio Between the US and Syria’. He has presented his work at the national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Musicological Society, and Middle East Studies Association, and is currently writing a book on popular music and transnational broadcasting in Syria and Lebanon.
Amy Cimini is a violist and historical musicologist. She is currently Assistant Professor of Music at UC San Diego, following a Mellon Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellowship in Music Theory at the University of Pennsylvania from 2011 to 2013. Her research, teaching, and performance engage twentieth-century philosophy and political thought with an emphasis on embodiment and ethics in experimental practice. Her book project discerns, in the work of US experimental composer Maryanne Amacher (1937–2009), a nascent theory of musical embodiment where the politics of life and the politics of audibility inextricably entangle differentially inflected distributions of power, agency, and security in the late twentieth-century US.
Joanna Demers is Associate Professor of Musicology at USC Thornton School of Music, where she has taught courses on popular and experimental music since 1945 as well as aesthetics and technology. She has written several books, including Anatomy of Thought-Fiction: CHS Report, 2214, forthcoming from Zero Books.
Stefan Helmreich is Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009) and, most recently, of Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016). His essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Anthropologist, and The Wire.
Niko Higgins teaches ethnomusicology at Sarah Lawrence College, where he also co-directs three world music ensembles. His research interests include musical fusion in South India, the sounds of swimming, and the imagined music and sound practised by diasporic South Asian musicians living in New York City.
Brian Kane is Associate Professor of Music at Yale University and the author of Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Peter McMurray is a musicologist and media artist. He is currently a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he is completing a book and film project on sound and Islam among diasporic communities from Turkey. Other research interests include oral poetry and the history of sound technology.
Jens Gerrit Papenburg is Guest Professor for Theory and History of Popular Music at Humboldt University Berlin (winter semester 2016/17). He is the sound review editor for Sound Studies (Routledge), co-founder of the international research network ‘Sound in Media Culture’ (funded by the German Research Foundation 2010–16) and co-editor of Sound as Popular Culture: A Research Companion (MIT Press, 2016). He received his PhD from Humboldt University for the thesis ‘Hörgeräte. Technisierung der Wahrnehmung durch Rock- und Popmusik’ (Listening Devices: Technologization of Perception through Rock and Pop Music). In 2016 he finished his Habilitation (second book), a cultural and media history of the ‘para-auditive’ dimension of popular music's sound.
Shayna Silverstein is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Nothwestern University. Her research generally examines the performative processes of politics, culture, and society in relation to sound and movement in the contemporary Middle East. Her current book project examines the performance tradition of Syrian dabke as a means for the strategic contestation of social class, postcolonial difference, and gender dynamics that shape the formation of public culture in contemporary Syria. Previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Penn Humanities Forum, she received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago.
Martha Sprigge is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines musical expressions of loss and mourning in Germany and Eastern Europe after the Second World War. She is currently writing a book about musical commemoration in the German Democratic Republic. Her work has been supported by the Michigan Society of Fellows, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Steven Weiss has been Curator of the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1999. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Audio Technology from American University and a Masters of Information and Library Studies from the University of Michigan. As Curator of the SFC, he oversees the preservation and access of over a quarter million archival sound recordings. Steve is currently producing a series of recordings from the collection for release on Yep Roc Records.
