Chelsea Burns is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Butler School of Music and affiliate faculty at the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, both at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies Latin American modernist concert music as well as bluegrass and country musics. She is especially interested in how contexts – economic, political, material – affect analytical interpretation. Her research suggests that such contextual understanding shapes analysis in critical ways, at times undermining prevailing musical interpretations. Her work touches on issues of race, postcoloniality, instrumental technologies, and expressions of privilege and class, among others. In addition to her work at the university, she is an avid bluegrass player and enjoys being part of the Austin bluegrass scene.
Brigid Cohen is Associate Professor of Music at New York University. She has taught and published on the politics of twentieth-century avant-gardes, archive studies, migration, genocide, imperialism, and intersections of music, literature, and the visual arts. Her first book, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, 2012), won the Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society. Her second book, Musical Migration and Imperial New York: Early Cold War Scenes (University of Chicago Press, 2022), explores questions of migration and citizenship through a study of New York concert avant-gardes, jazz, electronic music, and performance art. Her recent research has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Wellesley College. She is part of an arts collaborative that runs a Consent Lab at NYU.
Gavin S. K. Lee is Assistant Professor of Music at Soochow University, China, and a Visiting Fellow at Western Sydney University. He researches and teaches global and decolonial, Sinophone, Black and Sino-Afro, ancient and avant-garde and popular, queer and trans, and AI and animal musics and sounds. In addition to championing underrepresented composers, Lee has been among the first to advance emerging ideas and approaches such as East Asian ways of knowing music, global musical modernisms, global philosophy of music, global music history pedagogy, and queer/trans music theory. His publications include the forthcoming Estrangement from Ethnicity: Music and Sinophone Alienation (UMich), and two edited volumes, Queer Ear (Oxford), and Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music (Routledge). Lee has collaborated with around 200 researchers in editing two books and three special journal issues, and convening thirty-one conference panels. Since 2020, Lee has presented nine guest lectures on three continents at universities in the United States, Australia, Taiwan, and China.
Christopher J. Miller is a Senior Lecturer in Music at Cornell University, where he directs the gamelan ensemble. His primary focus as a researcher is Indonesian musik kontemporer, the subject of his dissertation (for the PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University) and several publications, including a chapter in the book Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music (Cornell University Press, 2022), which he co-edited with Andrew McGraw. This scholarly work grew out of his engagement with gamelan as a performer and composer, which has included collaborations with leading figures from Indonesia, among them AL Suwardi, Pande Made Sukerta, I Wayan Sadra, Michael Asmara, and Peni Candra Rini.
Sergio Ospina Romero is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. He is the author of two books, Dolor que canta (ICANH, 2017) and Fonógrafos ambulantes (Gourmet Musical, 2023), and of several articles, book chapters, and short pieces on sound reproduction technologies, Latin American music, and jazz. He has taught at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Universidad de los Andes, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, and Cornell University, and is the recipient of various awards, including Cornell University's Donald J. Grout Memorial Prize, the Klaus P. Waschmann Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and an honorary mention at the Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas. He is also the pianist and director of the Latin jazz ensemble Palonegro.
Kira Thurman is Associate Professor of History, German Studies, and Musicology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her first book, Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, appeared with Cornell University Press in 2021.
