(In alphabetical order):
Daphne A. Brooks is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP), winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity (Harvard University Press, forthcoming). Brooks is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell (Universal A&R, 2010) and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia(Sony, 2011), each of which has won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing. She is the editor of The Great Escapes: The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft(New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007) and The Performing Arts volume of The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere Series, eds. Howard Dodson and Colin Palmer (New York: Pro-Quest Information & Learning, 2006).
Shane Butler is Professor of Latin at the University of Bristol (UK). His research interests include the history and theory of media, sensation, and cognition. HIs recent books include The Matter of the Page (Wisconsin, 2011), The Ancient Phonograph (Zone, forthcoming 2015), and a co-edited volume, Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses (Acumen-Routledge, 2013). He currently is co-editing Sound and the Ancient Senses (Routledge) and editing A Deep Classics Reader (I. B. Tauris). Later in 2015 he will take up a new position as Professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
Hyun Kyong Chang (Ph.D., UCLA) explored Euro-American religious choral music in twentieth-century Korea in her dissertation, which she completed in 2014 with the support of an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship. She is currently a lecturer in musicology at UCLA. Her research projects investigate the influence of U.S.’s transnational religious, military, and political engagements on the perception and experience of vocal modernity in U.S.-allied Pacific Rim, particularly Korea and Japan. Her writing has appeared in Music & Politics and Journal of the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research.
Nina Sun Eidsheim is on the faculty of the UCLA Department of Musicology. As a scholar and singer she investigates the multi-sensory and performative aspects of the production, perception and reception of vocal timbre of twentieth and twenty-first century music. She is currently working on these ideas and repertoires in two monograph projects entitled Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (forthcoming, Duke University Press) and Measuring Race: Listening to Vocal Timbre and Vocality in African-American Popular Music. She is also co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies and a special issue on voice and materiality for the journal, Postmodern Culture. In addition, she is the principal investigator for the UC-wide, transdisciplinary research project entitled Keys to Voice Studies: Terminology, Methodology, and Questions Across Disciplines.
Jody Kreiman is Professor of Head and Neck Surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine. She is interested in all aspects of voice production, acoustics, and especially perception, and is co-author with Diana Sidtis of Foundations of Voice Studies.
Elias Krell is a musician, performer, and a scholar whose current book project centers the singing voice as a sonic lens for the lives and performance practices of contemporary transgender-identified musicians in North America. Krell received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies and Graduate Certificate in Gender & Sexuality Studies from Northwestern University, and currently teaches in the Feminist & Queer Studies Program at Vassar College on a two-year postdoctoral fellowship through the Consortium for Faculty Diversity. In 2014, Krell was named Emerging Diversity Scholar by the National Center for Institutional Diversity at University of Michigan. Krell is currently conducting ethnographic research in South America on themes of coloniality and indigeneity amongst punk musicians who identify as travesti or trans.
Tom McEnaney is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He has written for Cultural Critique, La Habana Elegante, and Variaciones Borges, as well as the sound studies blog Sounding Out! His book project, Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas, investigates the co-evolution of radio and the novel in Argentina, Cuba, and the United States, charting how authors in these countries began to re-conceive novel writing as an act of listening.
Eve McPherson is Assistant Professor of Music at Kent State University, Trumbull. Her research concerns vocal timbre, Islamic recitation practices, and Turkish art music genres and has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship, the Institute of Turkish Studies, the American Research Institute in Turkey, FLAS, Case Western Reserve University, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. In addition, she performs frequently as a soprano soloist in the Cleveland area with the Northeastern Ohio Vocal Ensemble (NEOVocE). As a singer she has a particular interest in performing and promoting contemporary Turkish art song.
Mara Mills is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, working at the intersection of disability studies and media studies. She is currently completing a book titled On the Phone: Deafness and Communication Engineering. Articles from this project can be found in Social Text, differences, the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, and The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies. Her second book project, Print Disability and New Reading Formats, examines the reformatting of print over the course of the past century by blind and other print disabled readers, with a focus on Talking Books and electronic reading machines. This new research is supported by NSF Award #1354297.
Rupal Patel is joint appointed across the Department of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology in Bouve College and the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. She directs the Communication Analysis and Design Laboratory, an interdisciplinary group that conducts research along two broad themes: 1) the acquisition and impairment of speech prosody (the melody of speech) in healthy speakers and those with neuromotor disorders, and 2) the design of speech enhancement and learning technologies that leverage the residual and/or developing capabilities of users. Learn more at: http://www.cadlab.neu.edu
Katarzyna Pisanski is postdoctoral research fellow in the Institute of Psychology at the University of Wrocław, Poland. She received her PhD in 2014 from McMaster University, Canada. Her research interests include vocal communication in humans and other animals from an evolutionary perspective. Currently, she is investigating how hormones affect the voice, and how voice production and perception vary across human cultures.
Ron Scherer, Ph.D., Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Bowling Green State University, teaches voice disorders and voice and speech science courses. His research interests include the physiology, mechanics, and acoustics of basic, abnormal, and performance sound production, and the methodologies involved in such research. He was Senior Scientist at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts voice laboratories and taught in the DCPA’s theatre voice and speech trainers program. In 2005 he was a Research Professor in the Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Cincinnati. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, a master’s degree from Indiana University in speech-language pathology, a B.S. degree in mathematics, and also spent two years as a music major at Indiana University.
Jessica A. Schwartz is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at UCLA. She explores musical representations and sonic histories of militarization and imperial violence, Pacific politics of indigeneity, and environmental concerns, such as nuclear contamination and climate change. She is working on two monographs: Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences, which details how Marshallese musically and textually evoke the consequences of the US nuclear weapons testing program in their country (1946–1958), as exemplified by precarious harmonies composed of irradiated women’s voices, and Repertoires of Survival: Civil Defense, Popular Music, and the Business of Atomic Aurality in Postwar America, which offers a sonic ecology of the early American atomic age with a focus on the relationship between US governmental sound design of civil defense, codified motifs in popular music, and the rise of the postwar youth market. In 2013, Prof. Schwartz co-founded and continues to serve as Cultural Programs Advisor to the Marshallese Educational Initiative, Inc., a not-for-profit organization based in Arkansas that raises cultural awareness of and promotes educational opportunities for the Marshallese population. An active guitarist, she composes and performs experimental noise-based and punk music.
Rosario Signorello helds an international double doctorate in Phonetic Science (University of Grenoble, France) and in Social Psychology (University of Roma Tre, Italy). He is currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Head and Neck Surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles. He conducts research in voice quality, laryngeal biomechanics, human charismatic voice. He is also interested in topics about voice behavior in non-human primate leadership, multimodal communication, social informatics, and affective computing.
Jason Stanyek teaches at the University of Oxford where he is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Tutorial Fellow at St. John’s College. Before arriving to Oxford he was Assistant Professor at New York University, Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard University, and External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. His research on Brazilian music and dance has appeared in a range of academic journals and edited volumes. He edited an interdisciplinary issue of the journal Critical Studies in Improvisation on Brazilian improvisation and was guest producer of an hour-long radio show called “The Brazilian Diaspora in the United States” for Public Radio International’s programme Afropop Worldwide. An volume on bossa nova (co-edited with Frederick Moehn) and an ethnographic monographic on Brazilian performance in the United States are forthcoming in 2016. He also frequently writes on music technology. The two-volume Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies (co-edited with Sumanth Gopinath) was published in early 2014 and “Deadness: Technologies of the Intermundane”—co-written with Benjamin Piekut and published in TDR—was given the Association of Theater in Higher Education’s Outstanding Article Award in 2011 and was also named by MIT Press as one of the 50 most influential articles published across all of its journals over the past 50 years. He currently serves as Reviews Editor of the journal Twentieth-Century Music and as general editor for Bloomsbury’s new series 33 1/3 Brazil, an offshoot of their long-running 33 1/3 series.
Chloe Veltman is a Denver-based journalist and broadcaster. She currently serves as arts editor at Colorado Public Radio. Find out more at chloeveltman.com.
Voice Studies Now 