Email: nb2324@columbia.edu

Tyler Bickford (MA 2006, MPhil 2007 in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University; BA 2001 with concentrations in Music and Modern Studies from Simon's Rock College) is writing his dissertation about the media consumption and expressive practices of children at a rural New England school. Tyler has presented papers about childhood music consumption, the "tween" music brand Kidz Bop, karaoke, and the phonology of singing to meetings of the Consumer Studies Research Network, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (US Branch), and the Humanities and Technology Association. His article, "Music of Poetry and Poetry of Song: Expressivity and Grammar in Vocal Performance" [pdf] (Ethnomusicology 51/3), explores the phonetics and phonology of expressive singing in a performance by Bob Dylan. He has also served as Editor-in-Chief of Current Musicology.
Email: tb2139@columbia.edu

(B.A. History, Universidad Javeriana; M.A. Ethnomusicology, Columbia University) He is interested in avant-garde and experimental musics, jazz within intercultural and transnational contexts, independent music scenes, and Afro-Colombian music. For ten years he has been a jazz and world music programmer for non-commercial radio stations in Bogotá, Colombia.
Email: sc2527@columbia.edu

(B.A. Journalism/Music History/Graphic Design from New York University, 2001) is interested in the political economy, social meaning and production of popular music in the former Czechoslovakia from the late 1960s to the present. She has also written extensively on American underground musical cultures such as post-hardcore and noise, as with her 2004 EMP Pop Conference paper "The Art of Noise: How Providence, RI hears its godawful racket." As a music journalist, she has written for the Chicago Tribune, MOJO, the Wire, the Nation, the Village Voice and dozens of small, independent publications. She is also currently working on a book of oral histories collected in the Wildwoods, three adjacent shore towns on a barrier island in Southern New Jersey.
Email: dcg2105@columbia.edu

(B.M. from NYU in jazz performance) is currently conducting research for a dissertation on music (taarab, ngoma, and hip hop), acoustemology and ethnic identity politics in Mombasa, Kenya. The research is being supported by Fulbright-Hays and the Social Science Research Council, and is being conducted in consultation with the newly-formed Institute of Swahili Studies within the National Museums of Kenya.
Website: http://www.andreweisenberg.com
Email: aje11@columbia.edu
 

Email: koe2101@columbia.edu

Email: lef2120@columbia.edu

Email: sjg2125@columbia.edu

(A.B. magna cum laude from Barnard College, in 2000 with a major in Ethnomusicology; M.A. in Music from Columbia University, 2003). In her Master’s Thesis, Welcome to the Thunderdome: Socio-Musical Conflict and the Search for Respect in the New York City Latin Jazz Scene, Melissa examines how conflict is represented and articulated in musical style and performance practice. Through an analytical examination of the production of genre ideology from multiple perspectives, she argued that musical genre, as a communicative field of action associated with recurrent discourses and practices, is a useful conceptual framework that uncovers the particular ways in which Latin jazz musicians situate themselves in the scene politically, socially, and creatively. She presented a paper based on this research at the 2005 national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Melissa’s current research interests include music and cultural policy, intellectual property, genre theory, popular music studies, and the musics of Latin America and the Latin American diaspora. She is a Columbia Teaching Fellow and has received predoctoral fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Ford Foundation. She is currently developing a dissertation project on the simultaneous commercialization and folklorization of Panamanian música típica. Melissa’s dissertation research is being supported by a Columbia University GSAS Travel Fellowship, an SSRC-Mellon Predoctoral Research Grant, a field research grant from the Institute of Latin American Studies, and a Ford Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship.
Email: mg293@columbia.edu

(BA in History from Oberlin 1997; MA in Ethnomusicology, Columbia, 2002) is studying the musics of Iran and Central Asia, as well as pop, electronic music, and dance club culture. Her MA thesis on a Brooklyn dance party scene called "Bang the Party" was entitled "BTP: Parties, Participants, and Practices." She presented a paper based on this work at the 2003 national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and has an article forthcoming in the journal Popular Music based on the this research entitled “Dancing through Difference at a House Music Party.” Her current interests focus on music and media of Iran and the Iranian diaspora in the United States, a topic she pursued on a trip to Iran in the summer of 2004. Work based on this research will be presented at both the 2004 Society of Ethnomusicology National Conference and the American Anthropological Association meetings in November 2004. She is a Columbia Teaching Fellow (2001-present) and a Columbia University Hutner Fellow (2003-4), and has received a Columbia University Summer Travel Funding (Summer 2004), NYU Kevorkian Center tuition grant, and was awarded a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship for the study of Persian (2003).
Email: fh2008@columbia.edu

(B.A. Wesleyan University, 1997; M.A. Columbia University, 2003) is an alto saxophonist who composes his own music and leads the Niko Higgins Ensemble. His first recording is due out on Engine Studios (www.engine-studios.com) in December, 2003. In addition to jazz and free jazz, Higgins has extensively studied South Indian classical music at Wesleyan University and studied studied Karnatic vocal music in Chennai, India on a 1997-98 Fulbright Fellowship. . He is currently doing graduate work in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University. . His MA thesis, "Improvisers Unite: Jump Arts, Free Jazz Improvisation, and Practice Theory," discusses free jazz interaction through his research on a New York City organization, "Jump Arts." He presented a paper based on this research at the 2003 national meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Presently in his third year at Columbia, he is formulating a dissertation project on improvisation.
Email: nah2002@columbia.edu

Anita Hoyvik entered the PhD program at Columbia in 2006-7. Her interests include music and religion, race, globalization, technology, and popular music.
Email: ah2207@columbia.edu

has more than ten years of experience as a writer, editor, producer, and curator, specializing in new media including video, audio, and computer-based work. He has served as Executive Director, Program Director, and Artistic Director at many non-profit arts organizations, including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Harvestworks Media Arts, Inc., and the Headlands Center for the Arts. While Editor of Tellus, the Audio Magazine, he was producer for several compact disc compilation recordings of experimental music and sound art. As a musician, he has performed his own and others' works at numerous venues including the Knitting Factory, CBGB?s, Merkin Hall, and Roulette in New York City. His work as a media artist (videomaker as well as sound designer for video and live performance) has appeared in the Whitney Biennial (2002) and the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center (2002); has been purchased for the collection of the Jewish Museum (2001) in New York City; and won First Prize at the Leggera Film Festival in Italy (2000) as well as a Golden Gate Award Certificate of Merit at the San Francisco International Film Festival (2002). His Master's Thesis (2002) for the Ethnomusicology Program at Columbia University's was titled "Creation and Maintenance of Cultural Identity by Palestinian Musicians in New York City." As well as music of the Middle East, he also specializes in translocal popular musics and their various mediations.
Email: bbk41@columbia.edu

(BA in Music History and Journalism from Loyola University; MA in Ethnomusicology, Columbia 2001; MPhil, Columbia, 2003) came to Columbia with a background in popular music journalism. Her MA thesis was entitled “Women Making a Scene: Marketing, Feminism, and Image in the New York City Rock Music Scenes”). She has served as a TA for the Music Humanities course at Columbia, and as an assistant editor for the Yearbook for Traditional Music She is currently conducting doctoral field research on the "Ladyfest" women's music festival in the Pacific Northwest. She recently presented a paper on the critical reception of the music of Courtney Love and the band Hole at the 2003 national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Email: ekk12@columbia.edu

(BA in Geology, with additional concentration in Medieval and Renaissance English literature, from Amherst 1994; MS in Geology from the University of Montana in Missoula 1997; MA in Music Theory from Columbia 2000 with emphasis on music cognition, musical genres, and interpretive improvisation) is currently, he is working toward his MPhil in ethnomusicology and is conducting research on musical communication and genre-formation within bluegrass and country music performance communities in New York City. For the past two years, he has been the teaching assistant for the Center for Ethnomusicology. When not troubleshooting computer networks or doing fieldwork, he can generally be found practicing the banjo.
Email: jk560@columbia.edu

(BA: New York University 1992, MA and MPhil, Columbia University) wrote her Masters thesis, "African Cuban Sacred Music in Performance: Felipe García Villamil and Grupo Emikeké of New York," on the relationship between ritual space and African Cuban liturgical music in the North American urban context. Her dissertation in progress is an exploration of a Haitian immigrant processional genre that serves to affirm shifting ethnic, religious and class identities in the Dominican Republic. It is entitled "Gaga in the Dominican Republic: The Construction of Identities through Performance." Her interests include ritual musics of the African diaspora and transnational musics in the context of migration within the Caribbean region, and Caribbean immigration to the United States.
Email: mel23@columbia.edu
mlandies@earthlink.net

(B.A. magna cum laude in Religious Studies, the University of Arizona, 2005;  M.A. in Ethnomusicology, Columbia University, 2007). The juxtaposition between material and expressive culture expressed within the global circulation and exchange of "things" is Charles' primary research interest. His dissertation project will explore these disjunctures among architectural projects that are transforming the physical and visual landscape of Reykjavik and ostensibly, affecting Icelandic senses of identity and space. His dissertation topic is fueled, in part from Charles' interest in the social history of his own material goods such as ballet pointe shoes and pianos.

Charles is a pianist, dancer, singer and composer. During his youth, he studied composition at Westminster Choir College, San Francisco Conservatory and piano under the auspices of the Associate Boards of Royal Schools of Music. When he was 15, soloists from the Philadelphia Orchestra debuted his first piano quintet, "Celestial Suite". Ten years later, he is working as a pop singer-songwriter with an Argentine megaproducer in South Beach. His personal stylistic shifts have inspired his secondary interest in the use of pianistic ability among major label artists to arouse a mutual belief in authenticity and musicality between performers and fans.

Charles is currently a Columbia Teaching Fellow and has received the Haynes Fellowship in Social Sciences (2007-2008) at Columbia University. He was a McNair scholar at the University of Arizona where he began studying ethnomusicology under the tutelage of Dr. Janet Sturman, a Center for Ethnomusicology alumnus.

Email: cal2135@columbia.edu

(B.A. 2001, Music History, University of Wisconsin, Madison; M.A. 2003, M.Phil 2005, Ethnomusicology, Columbia University.)

Morgan’s research interests include cultural policy, the cultural industries, music and economic development, cultural tourism, transnationalism, aesthetics, and the uses of music history. He has conducted research on several musical genres, including contemporary Argentine tango, “downtown” improvised music, and world music. Morgan’s undergraduate work on avant-garde bassist and producer Bill Laswell received the Hilldale award for undergraduate research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His M.A. thesis, “Tonight at Tonic: Practicing Place in a New York Art World” (2003), examined how musical values were cultivated for non-institutionalized “high art” musics by a transnational avant-garde music community centered on the nightclub Tonic, and how that community made sense of the rapid economic transformation the neighborhood in which the club was physically and symbolically emplaced was then undergoing.

Morgan’s current dissertation research focuses on music and cultural policy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he will be conducting fieldwork until the fall of 2007. Taking contemporary tango as its case, this project concentrates on the contested interconnections between the activities of musicians who have self-consciously returned to tango as means of re-exploring and re-articulating their identities as Argentines following the 2001 economic crisis and the cultural policies of the city government of Buenos Aires which channel and promote tango as an economic resource for the city and its citizens, primarily through programs that aim to develop the local cultural industries and cultural tourism. An article on themusical side of this equation, “Tango Renovación: On the Uses of Music History in Post-Crisis Argentina,” will appear in the forthcoming issue of Latin American Music Review (28:1, Spring/Summer 2007). Morgan has presented his work at the annual meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), the American Anthropological Society (AAA), the US and Latin American branches of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and elsewhere. At Columbia, Morgan has served as the assistant editor of Current Musicology and as an instructor in the Music Humanities core course.
Email: mjl2003@columbia.edu

(BA in music from Bowdoin; two years of MFA studies in world music and jazz at Cal-Arts; Certificate in African Studies from the Institute for African Studies at Columbia; MA and MPhil in Ethnomusicology from Columbia) wrote his MA thesis on "Giant Step: Innovation, Technology and Performance in a Jazz Inspired Dance Club" which examines the appropriation of a jazz ideology in an underground New York hip hop club.. He is currently writing a dissertation entitled "Senegalese Urban Popular Music: Jazz, Mbalax, and Rap" based on fieldwork in Senegal supported by the Ford Foundation, and holds a pre-doctoral writing fellowship at Saint Lawrence University. His academic service included research on the Malcolm X project at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia. He was also a pre-doctoral fellow in the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Globalizing City Cultures at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society and participates frequently in the activities of the Center for Jazz Studies. His review of the CD "Keepers of the Talking Drum" appeared on Ethnomusicology Online (EOL). He presented a paper based on his research in Senegal at the 2003 national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Email: trm8@columbia.edu

Email: jn2288@columbia.edu

(M.A, African American Studies, Columbia University; Certificate of Graduate Study, Musicology, Duke University; B.A. African American Studies, high honors, Oberlin College; B.M. Voice Performance, Oberlin Conservatory of Music). Marti's research focuses on singing, race and repertoire in the United States. Her current ethnographic work investigates how Japanese Americans construct a black vocal aesthetic through singing spirituals in Harlem. Marti won the Langston Hughes Thesis Award for the Humanities for her M.A. thesis titled "Concert Spirituals' Minstrel Inheritance." She has served as adjunct faculty at the Seton Hall University Department of Art and Music. Her publications include entries in the African American National Biography (Oxford University Press), the Encyclopedia of African American Music (Greenwood Press), Souls Journal (Taylor and Francis) and the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Research Journal.

(BA in Music and Russian Regional from Barnard College, 2002; M.A., M.Phil. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, 2005, 2006). Lauren Ninoshvili is currently preparing a dissertation on the use of vocables in contemporary Georgian folk-fusion music. Her fieldwork, carried out primarily in Tbilisi, was supported by an Individual Advanced Research Opportunities (IARO) grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). Lauren has presented her work at academic conferences in the US and Europe. Her article, “Report from the Kitchen Sink: The Supra and the Seeds of a Georgian Feminism” appears in the edited volume Nation in Formation: Inclusion and Exclusion in Central and Eastern Europe (London: UCL-SSEES, 2007). Lauren’s research interests include the folk and sacred polyphony of the South Caucasus Republic of Georgia, language and music, translation theory, and the language of world music. She is book reviews editor for Current Musicology, Columbia’s peer-reviewed journal.
Email: ln2106@columbia.edu

(MM in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from the Hochschule für Musik, Köln, Germany 1995 with a thesis on "Traditional Forms of Music Making in the Cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa"; Certificate in African Studies from the Institute of African Studies at Columbia with a final research paper on "Cultural Nationalism in Guinea and Les Ballets Africains; 1947-1967;" MA and MPhil in Ethnomusicology from Columbia) wrote an MA thesis at Columbia entitled "African Dance in New York City - Constructing and Negotiating Identities"; MPhil 2002). Her areas of interest are West Africa and Afghanistan. She is currently conducting dissertation field research on urban popular music in Togo, West Africa. She served as TA for the Asian Music Humanities and the Western Music Humanities courses at Columbia, as well as an editorial assistant for the ICTM UNESCO collection project.
Email: ms829@columbia.edu

(A.B., Harvard University, 2008, cum laude in Special Concentration in Ethnomusicology) 

Samuel joined the Ph.D. programme in ethnomusicology at Columbia University in the fall of 2008, where he was awarded a Faculty Fellowship in the Department of Music.  His research interests include linguistic anthropology, cultural heritage, and performance.  He is a member of the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Current Musicology and participates in the Japanese gagaku world music performance ensemble at Columbia.  Fluent in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, he has ethnographic experience in the United States, Quebec, continental Europe, and Peru, where he was affiliated with the Instituto de Etnomusicología at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. 

E-mail: ss3485@columbia.edu

(B.A. magna cum laude 2000, French and Francophone Studies, Carleton College; M.A. 2005, M.Phil. 2006, Ethnomusicology, Columbia University) studies musical performance, listening, space, sound, subjectivity, and ethics Africa and its European and American diasporas. Currently, Ryan is completing a dissertation (Artistiya: Popular Music and Personhood in Postcolonial Bamako, Mali) on popular musical expression, artistic personhood (artistiya), and postcolonial history in Mali, West Africa. He has also conducted and published studies on immigration, diaspora formation, and musical identity among West African communities in New York City.

Over the past ten years, Ryan has conducted extensive fieldwork in West Africa, Europe, and the United States, focusing on musical performance and listening practices among Mande peoples worldwide. In his Master’s Thesis, “Jeliya in New York City: An Ethnography of Space, Travel, and Practice in Urban America” (2005), Ryan discusses the interrelation of migratory experiences, musical expression, and cultural identity in the Mande diaspora of New York City. In an article, "Determined Urbanites: Diasporic Jeliya in the 21st Century" (Mande Studies Vol. 6, 2004), Ryan elucidates a modern "culture of travel" among West African musicians practicing an increasingly global tradition of praise singing, instrumental performance, storytelling, and dance known as jeliya. A forthcoming article in the Journal Popular Music (29/1, 2010), "Civil Taxis and Wild Trucks: The Dialectics of Space and Subjectivity in Dimanche à Bamako" presents a close reading (or listening) of Amadou & Mariam’s most recent album, Dimanche à Bamako (2004), meaning "Sunday in Bamako," produced "by and with" world music maverick Manu Chao. The article considers how the album musically renders, through sound and lyrical expression, the tensions of what may be called "global modernity" in postcolonial Africa and its diasporas. Ryan is also the author an illustrator of the children's book Sidikiba's Kora Lesson (Beaver's Pond Press, 2008).

Ryan’s current dissertation work focuses on the musical politics and poetics of personhood in postcolonial Bamako, Mali. Specifically, his study engages with a particular community of urban artists – popular musicians – whose lives and works are locally glossed by the Bamana term “artistiya,” a neologism meaning “artistic personhood.” As a study of personhood among artists in Bamako, Ryan's work emphasizes the particular ethical concerns that artists daily confront in a postcolonial society structured by clientelism, plagued by corruption, and burdened by poverty. Fieldwork for this project was generously supported by dissertation research fellowships from the Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Research Fellowship) and Wenner-Gren Foundation. Data analysis and write-up have been supported by a fifth-year dissertation writing fellowship from the Department of Music (Columbia University) and a Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Writing Fellowship (Woodrow Wilson Foundation). Ryan anticipates defending his thesis in May 2009.
Email: rts2104@columbia.edu

Visit Whitney's website
Email: wjs2105@columbia.edu
whitneyslaten@whitneyslaten.com

(B.M. 2005 in music performance and English literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; M.A.  2008 in Ethnomusicology, Columbia University). Sara is the treasurer for the Mid-Atlantic Chapter for the Society of Ethnomusicology and the jazz assistant for the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program at Columbia. She is currently finishing the requirements for the M.A. in Ethnomusicology. Her thesis is entitled, "Music, Modesty, and Socialization at an Orthodox Jewish Girls' School: The Musical Life of Bais Yaakov of Boro Park." For future research, Sara wishes to explore the role of music and other performing arts in cultural and linguistic revitalization movements in contemporary indigenous communities.

Email: sls2149@columbia.edu

(BA in Slavic Regional Studies and Music, Barnard College, 2003) is interested in music in diaspora, particularly in processes of nostalgia and ideologies of authentic experience. Her undergraduate research focused on music of post-Soviet Ukraine, post-Communist Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia, culminating in a thesis on appropriations of folk symbology in post-Soviet Ukrainian rock and avant garde festivals. Currently, she is focusing on the Ukrainian diasporas of Brazil and Argentina. In addition to her ethnomusicologial pursuits, Maria performs many kinds of music on the accordion, piano, and oboe.
See Maria's Accordion project website
Email: ms2147@columbia.edu

(B.A. in Music [flute performance] and Religious Studies, Lawrence University 2002; M.A. in Ethnomusicology, Columbia 2005). Anna's undergraduate work focused on music/sound in Hindu and Buddhist practice. Her M.A. thesis, "Conflict and Confluence: Constructing and Crossing Boundaries at the Ahiri Institute for Indian Music and Dance," examined Indian classical performers’ representation of Indian heritage in intercultural situations in New York City. Anna's dissertation project addresses the role of an emerging Nepali popular genre, dohori git, in rural-urban migrants' negotiation of gendered national identity. Work based on this research was presented at the 2006 meeting of IASPM-USA. Her research interests include Nepali and other Himalayan musics, media and circulation, performance theory, and the role of music and sound in development and social movements. Anna has been a Columbia Teaching Fellow and has received the FLAS for summer study of Nepali (2004), and the Columbia Summer Travel Grant for research in Nepal (2005). Her dissertation research is being supported by Fulbright-Hays and the Social Science Research Council.
Email: ams2110@columbia.edu