Alessandra Ciucci
Alessandra Ciucci is in her first year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia University. She holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation, "Poems of Honor, Voices of Shame: The 'Aita and the Moroccan Shikhat." analyzes the relationship between a class of Moroccan professional female singer-dancers and a genre of sung poetry which forms the core of their repertory, combines ethnography, performance studies and a music-poetic analysis of the texts. She has received fellowships from the Fullbright, the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, and the Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women. Her research interests include: Morocco, North Africa, Arabic music, Arab popular music, music of the Mediterranean, sung poetry, music and gender, dance, and performance studies.
David Novak
David Novak is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the Heyman Center, Columbia University. (B.A., East Asian Studies, 1992. Oberlin College; M.A., Ethnomusicology, 1999. Wesleyan University; Thesis: "The National and the Transnational in the Japanese Underground." Ph.D. Columbia University 2006 ) David's dissertation is a multi-sited ethnography (based on research funded by Fulbright, The Social Science Research Council, and The Mellon Foundation) on the circulation of experimental music between North America and Japan. The project deals with the translocal distribution of media, debates about musical genre, histories of international avant-garde movements, local modes of listening and technological mediation in urban network, and shows how marginal practices can articulate critiques of globalization. He is currently revising this work for a forthcoming book contracted with Duke University Press, entitled Japanoise: Global Media Circulation and Experimental Music. David's other interests include Javanese gamelan, history of sound recording, Karnatic music, and film music. His performing ensembles include Habit Trail and Maestros (a country rock band and a live electroacoustic duo, respectively); the Anthony Braxton Ensemble; cut-up pop group Dymaxion, and Balinese angklung ensemble Chandra Bawana. Recent publications include “2.5 by 6 Metres of Space: Japanese Music Coffeehouses and Experimental Practices of Listening.” Popular Music 27(1):15-34, and “Onkyo/Oto, Chinmoku/Ma, to Impuro no Sendaitekina Disukuuru" [“Sound, Silence, and the Global Discourses of Improvisation”], in the Japanese-language volume The New Jazz Studies, ed. M. Molasky, Ongaku no Tomosha: Tokyo.
Josh Pilzer
Josh Pilzer is currently in his second year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at Columbia. He holds an MA in Ethnomusicology from University of Hawa'ii and a PhD in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago. His research and teaching focus on Korean and Japanese folk and popular singing and the experience, memory, and memorialization of traumatic events in East Asian modernity. He is currently working on a manuscript based on his doctoral dissertation, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery. He received the Society for Ethnomusicology?s Charles Seeger Prize in 2001; his articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, in The Courtesan's Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Oxford University Press 2006), and elsewhere. He will take up a position as Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Toronto in the Fall of
2009.
Chie Sakakibara
Center for Ethnomusicology and Earth Institute
Chie Sakakibara received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Oklahoma (OU) in 2007. She is a cultural geographer interested in global indigenous studies and human-animal interactions. Prior to her Ph.D., she has completed her degrees in Native American Studies (B.A., 2000) and Art History (M.A., 2002) at OU. Her current research focuses on global warming and its influence on traditional human relationships with the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) in the Alaskan Arctic. During her fieldwork among the Iñupiaq people in Barrow and Point Hope, Alaska (2004-7), she was adopted by several whaling families and experienced their subsistence activities including whaling. Chie’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Geography and Regional Science Program and by the Arctic Social Sciences Program. She also works closely with institutions such as the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC), the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, the Center for Ethnomusicology at Columbia University, and the Arctic Studies Center at Smithsonian Institution. In the past, Chie has given several invited lectures at various institutions: the Center for Ethnomusicology at CU, Tokyo University of Science (Japan), Nagoya University (Japan), Nagoya City University (Japan), the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium and Ilisaġvik College (Barrow, Alaska). In addition to her research, she collaborates with the Center for Ethnomusicology for their Iñupiaq music heritage repatriation project led by Dr. Aaron A. Fox. Chie has served on the faculty in the Native American Studies Program at OU, and in the fall 2008 she will teach Native Peoples of North America in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. Her article titled “Drowning Home: Iñupiaq Storytelling and Climate Change in Point Hope, Alaska” (2008) appears in The Geographical Review (Volume 98, Number 4).
Emily Wilbourne
Emily Wilbourne is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in music at Columbia University. Her work concerns the historiography of past performance, focusing on Italian theatre during the early decades of the seventeenth century. Her dissertation, “La Florinda: The Performance of Virginia Ramponi Andreini (1583-1630/1)”, explores the specific performances of gender, sexuality, class and race that were embodied by a particular commedia dell’arte actress and singer, and the impact of overlapping musical and theatrical genres on the emergence of early opera. Emily is currently the managing editor for Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. She has published articles on Virginia Andreini in Recercare (2007) and Teatro e storia (2007), and has also published on the performance of academic labour in Workplace (2007). She compiled the updated bibliography of lesbian and gay music scholarship for the second edition of Queering the Pitch (2006) and has reviewed books for The Cambridge Opera Journal (2006).
