Contributors’ Notes

Paul Ballam-Cross is a writer, composer, and classical guitarist. He has completed a BA in music in performance, majoring in classical guitar, and a Ph.D. in musicology. Ballam-Cross is a regular reviewer for Limelight Magazine in Australia and a casual lecturer at the University of Queensland. His research interests include exploring transcriptions for guitar and the methods used in creating them, as well as the multitude of intersections between popular music and the internet.

Nomi Dave is an interdisciplinary researcher on voice, violence, and the law, with a geographical focus on francophone West Africa. She is the author of The Revolution’s Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea (2019, University of Chicago Press), which won the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Ruth Stone Prize for best first book. She previously worked as a human rights lawyer for the United Nations refugee agency in Guinea and is currently associate professor of music at the University of Virginia.

Steacy Easton is a writer and artist who grew up in Edmonton, Saskatchewan, Canada, and is now living in Hamilton, Ontario. They write often about the intersections of working-class culture, family, money and religion.

Judith Fathallah is a post-doctoral researcher at Solent University in Southampton, U.K. Her research interests lie in the areas of digital cultures, fan studies, convergence between media industries and users, user-generated content, and popular culture. She is the author of Fanfiction and the Author: How Fanfiction Changes Popular Cultural Texts (Amsterdam University Press 2017) and Emo: How Fans Defined a Subculture (Iowa University Press 2020).

Emily Margot Gale is lecturer in popular music studies at University College Cork, Ireland. Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People—her book in progress—explores intersections between sentimentalism, gender, class, and race with chapters on nineteenth-century sentimental ballads; The National Barn Dance, an early Chicago radio program; Mitch Miller’s 1960s television show Sing Along with Mitch; and 1970s soft rock. She hosts a radio show about her research on Threads*/sub_ʇxǝʇ and her feminist music column History Witch appears in Berlin’s Schmutz zine. Gale completed a BA in music at the University of Ottawa, Canada, in 2005 and an MA in music theory from the University of Western Ontario in 2007. After a year in the inaugural class of Western’s MA in popular music and culture (2007-08), she entered the University of Virginia’s Critical and Comparative Studies program, earning her Ph.D. in 2014.

Jelena Gligorijević is a scholar of popular music with a strong international academic record (spanning Serbia, Britain, and Finland), and with multiple research interests (from music festivals to queer karaoke). Her primary area of expertise is issues of identity, power, and politics in Balkan popular music across the former Yugoslav region. This also applies to her doctoral dissertation, Contemporary Music Festivals as Micronational Spaces: Articulations of National Identity in Serbia’s Exit and Guča Trumpet Festivals (2019), which studied national identity in post-Milošević Serbia using the country’s two major music festivals as case studies. Gligorijević is currently affiliated with the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where she is doing smaller-scale ethnographic research on cultural and political meaning-making surrounding St. Gallen’s alternative music venue “Palace.“

Paula Clare Harper received her Ph.D. in historical musicology from Columbia University and currently holds an appointment as a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on music, sound, and the internet, and her work has been published in the journals Popular Music and Society, The Soundtrack, Sound Studies, and a Summer 2020 special issue of American Music, for which she also served as a co-editor. Currently, Dr. Harper is at work on a book project titled Viral Musicking and the Rise of Noisy Platforms.

Morgan Luker is associate professor of music at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. An ethnomusicologist, Luker’s scholarly work focuses on the cultural politics of Latin American music. He is the author of The Tango Machine: Musical Culture in the Age of Expediency (University of Chicago Press) and the founding director of Tango for Musicians at Reed College (www.reed.edu/tango). His current research examines the materiality and management of historical sound recordings as objects of knowledge in and about Argentina.

Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an assistant professor of African American literature and culture at the University of Toledo. She is the author of Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, about autobiographical self-fashioning in contemporary American blues fiction and popular music (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020). Mack’s second book, The Untold History of Early American Rock Criticism, about the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and white women, who helped develop American rock journalism during the 1960s and 1970s, is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. She is also a music critic who has contributed her work to national and international publications, including Music Connection, Relix, No Depression, PopMatters, and Hot Press.

Sara Marcus is assistant professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and associate editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. She is the author of Girls to the Front, a critical and cultural history of the 1990s punk-feminist movement Riot Grrrl. Her essays and criticism on music, sound, literature, and art have appeared in American Literature, Artforum, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, and Texte zur Kunst, among other places. Marcus is currently completing a book about political disappointment in twentieth-century U.S. culture.

John Morgan O’Connell is an Irish ethnomusicologist with a specialist interest in cultural history. Currently professor of ethnomusicology at Cardiff University, U.K., he has taught musicology and ethnomusicology at Otago University, NZ, and the University of Limerick, Ireland, among others. His publications concern in principle issues related to music and conflict in ethnomusicology (Illinois, 2010), music and aesthetics in Turkey (Routledge, 2013), and music and commemoration in WW1 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). He is currently working on an edited collection that concerns the politics of staged folklore in Ireland (Cork, under contract).

Shana L. Redmond is a public-facing scholar and the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity (NYU 2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke 2020). In 2019 she contributed the critical liner notes to the vinyl soundtrack release for Jordan Peele’s film Us (2019). She is professor of musicology, global jazz studies, and African American studies. “… studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.”

Alex Reed is the author of Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music, a forthcoming volume on Laurie Anderson and co-author of the 33 1/3 book on They Might Be Giants’ Flood. He has published in Slate, PopMatters, and Interface, and in many academic journals. Prior to his position as associate professor of music and integrative studies at Ithaca College, Reed taught at NYU, the University of Florida, and College of William & Mary. A pop musician, his work has appeared on MTV and in the show Gossip Girl.

Paul Rekret is the author of two books: Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence (Repeater 2017), Derrida and Foucault: Philosophy, Politics, Polemics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), along with many articles on political and cultural theory in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society and South Atlantic Quarterly. He is part of the Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, writes on sound and ecological crisis with Amplification//Annihilation, and is currently writing a book on solicitations to “work” in popular music as well as editing a new edition of George Caffentzis’s book, Clipped Coins. He teaches political theory at Richmond American International University in London.

Marlen Ríos-Hernández is a 2019-2021 UC president’s postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation “We Were There”: From Alice Bag to Emos The War on Punk and Other Décadas Podridas is a full-length hemispheric comparative study of queer Chicana and Latina participants in the Los Angeles/Southern California and Latin American punk scenes from 1977 to 2001, respectively. Her book project focuses on early policing in SoCal punk “Post”-COINTELPRO.

Ruth E. Rosenberg is associate professor of music at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her first book, Music, Travel, and Imperial Encounter in Nineteenth-Century France: Musical Apprehensions (Routledge Studies in Ethnomusicology, 2014), examines narratives of musical encounter found in Romantic travel writing and in the work of proto-ethnomusicologists in the French empire. In addition to ongoing historical work on American music in the French imaginary during the long nineteenth century, Rosenberg conducts research related to historical and current debates over tuning standards and the 432 Hz music phenomenon.

Jon Stratton is an adjunct professor in UniSA Creative at the University of South Australia. He has published widely in cultural studies, popular music studies, Jewish studies, Australian studies and on race and multiculturalism. His most recent books, coedited with Jon Dale and with Tony Mitchell, are An Anthology of Australian Albums: Critical Engagements (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Maya Angela Smith is an associate professor of French at the University of Washington. Her scholarship focuses primarily on the intersection of racial and linguistic identity formations among marginalized groups in the francophone African diaspora, seen in such works as her recent book, Senegal Abroad. In her current project, Reclaiming Venus: The Many Lives of Alvenia Bridges, Smith interviews Bridges about her serendipitous life story, including her behind-the-scenes role in the music industry. This storytelling sheds light on the cultural and social aspects of the entertainment industry, particularly the racialized and gendered experiences of those who participate in music and fashion.

Karen Tongson is the author of Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2020), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). In 2019, she received Lambda Literary’s Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction for her body of work. She is chair of gender & sexuality studies, and professor of English, gender & sexuality studies, and American studies & ethnicity at USC. She is also co-editor of the award-winning book series, Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press, and co-host and executive producer of the podcast Waiting to X-Hale with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh.

Eric Weisbard co-edits the Journal of Popular Music Studies and is an associate professor of American studies at University of Alabama. He’s the author of Songbooks: The Literature of American Popular Music, out in spring 2021, and Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music. A longtime organizer of the Pop Conference, he has co-organized the weekly Popular Music Books in Process Series, a collaboration between JPMS, IASPM-US, and the Pop Conference, during the Covid shutdown.

Simon Zagorski-Thomas is professor at the London College of Music (University of West London) and is founder and chair of the 21st Century Music Practice research network with more than 250 members in 30 countries. He was the co-founder of the Art of Record Production conference, now in its fifteenth year, and, until 2017, was also co-chair of the Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production. He worked for 25 years as a composer, sound engineer and producer and is, at present, conducting research into 21st Century Musical Practice. His books include The Art of Record Production, which he co-edited with Simon Frith, the Musicology of Record Production (winner of the 2015 IASPM Book Prize), the second Art of Record Production book on creative practice (edited with Katia Isakoff, Serrge Lacasse and Sophie Stévance) and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production (edited with Andrew Bourbon). He is editor of the CUP Elements series on 21st Century Music Practice and is currently writing a monograph on practical musicology for Bloomsbury Academic Press.