I am an academic who examines the forms of intimacy that emerge through artistic collaboration and shared aesthetic beliefs, with particular investment in queer, feminist, and anti-racist perspectives in art and popular music after 1900. My work has appeared in The Journal of Musicology, PMLA, and Women & Music.

I currently teach in the Music History and Cultures Program at Syracuse University as well as the Rutgers Arts Online program for the Mason Gross School of the Arts.

I am also in the final year of my tenure as co-chair of the Music and Philosophy Study Group for the American Musicological Society.

My disciplinary approach to and training in historical musicology is equally indebted to Frankfurt School Critical Theory as well as Gender and Sexuality Studies having earned:

  • BA in Music History with a minor in LGBT Studies (UCLA, 2012)

  • MA in Musicology with an emphasis in Women’s and Gender Studies (McGill, 2015)

  • PhD in Music Studies with a certificate in Critical Theory (Northwestern, 2021)

Salient here is my time as a Mellon Interdisciplinary Cluster Fellow in Gender and Studies at Northwestern and as a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Univesity College DUblin where I was cosponsored by the Schools of Music and Philosophy.

I currently am at work on my first book project, Intimate Critique: Henze, Adorno, and the Aesthetics of Recommitment, which places composer Hans Werner Henze’s collaborative ventures of the 1950s and early 1960s into conversation with Theodor W. Adorno’s contemporaneous ethical and sociological writings. I do so to develop a practice of what I term intimate critique—a method that interrogates the ways in which music brings people into close contact with one another, and asks to what extent such processes rely on the exclusions of others. Intimate Critique is thus more than a biographical case study; it offers a much-needed theorization of artistic collaboration that demonstrates how intimacy can transcend the strictures of identity-thinking while remaining a vital, if not foundational, source for musical and ethical life.

My other research interests broadly fall within the intersection of law, music, and obscenity, with particular attention to: the illegal use of James Brown’s music in interracial gay pornography, Adorno’s sociolegal commentary, as well as Susan Sontag’s archive of cultural and diaristic criticism.

A Southern California native now based in Syracuse, I have also had the pleasure of having taught at DePaul University, the School for the Art Institute of Chicago, and Connecticut College in addition to my current posting.

[For a more detailed about my research and teaching interests, please see my Publications and Syllabi pages]