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.  read more »

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.  read more »

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.  read more »

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.  read more »

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.  read more »