I am academic whose teaching and research focuses on issues of identity-thinking within mid-twentieth-century music, cultural criticism, and law. Specifically, I investigate the tensions that arise out of creative, intimate relationships in light of their ability to produce music that both affirms and complicates normative lines of identification.

My work has appeared in The Journal of Musicology, PMLA, and Women & Music, and 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 currently am at work on my first book project, Intimate Critique: Nonidentity and the Romance of New Music, which reanimates debates between Hans Werner Henze and Theodor W. Adorno concerning music’s proper social and stylistic form following the damages to interpersonal life and love after Auschwitz. 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.

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