2026–27 AMS Fellows Announced

Proposed Dissertation Title: The Empire Sings Back: Operatic Histories of British-Indian Colonial Encounter

Anushka Kulkarni’s dissertation examines the history of opera as a dynamic site of British–Indian colonial encounter. Through analyzing the Bengali poet-composer Rabindranath Tagore’s musical dramas alongside the depiction of Indian colonial subjects in Handel’s opera seria, the dissertation illuminates the negotiations of colonial subjectivity through a wealth of nuanced and original research. Attending to the local creative reception of European operatic institutions, the project in turn demonstrates the malleability of the idea of opera itself as it assumed shifting meanings, functions, and political valences across colonial contexts. The committee was especially impressed by the project’s range of methodologies, archives, and musical repertoires, its global horizon for operatic imperial history, and its command of both postcolonial theory and opera studies.

Proposed Dissertation Title: “Yesterday I Was Singing”: A Sounded History of Political Belonging in Mandate Palestine (1920–1948)

Kira Mackey’s carefully researched dissertation, “‘Yesterday I Was Singing’: A Sounded History of Political Belonging in Mandate Palestine (1920–1948),” addresses how music and sound, sawt in Arabic, provided a unifying and purposeful voice to the formation of communal identity in Mandate Palestine. Her project builds on previous scholarship on music and colonialism, adds new insight into the perception and uses of music in Mandate Palestine, and establishes a framework for theorizing a sonic imaginary of identity and resistance. What makes this work particularly important is the diverse array of multilingual, often fractured sources ranging from radio to print media to anashīd or “anthems,” to look at not only the colonial gaze on Palestinians, but the response by Palestinians to colonial oppression through sound, song, and protest. Throughout, Mackey uses the concept and meanings of sawt and shahāda (bearing witness) to explore how the voice became a central theme to Palestinian identity; focusing, as the author notes not on ideals of what a “citizen should be”, but how Palestinians created their own vision of citizenship, identity and belonging as a means for anti-colonial resistance.

Proposed Dissertation Title: A Highway Acoustemology: American Popular Music in the Age of Internal Combustion

John Clement Wood’s dissertation, “A Highway Acoustemology: American Popular Music in the Age of Internal Combustion,” examines how the American fascination with, and reliance on, the automobile throughout the twentieth century was intertwined with music as “popular songs helped to define the changing values and meanings of automobility.” The committee was impressed by Wood’s vivid writing­­ and robust theoretical framework, which draws from ethnomusicology, environmental sociology, science and technology studies, and psychoanalysis. By studying experiential accounts of driving­––in songs and prose––and technical descriptions of automobiles, dating back to circa 1900, Wood traces how human ecological behavior has been influenced by the evolving cultural significance and musicality of cars. The committee commends Wood’s project for its conceptual precision and scope, which encompasses both “minute cultural details and broad social/ecological systems.” This work offers new perspectives on the ecological impacts of musicking that will undoubtedly enrich ecomusicological discourse.

Proposed Dissertation Title: The Black Alternative: A Cultural and Musical Phenomenon

Jordan Brown’s dissertation, “The Black Alternative: A Cultural and Musical Phenomenon,” makes a theoretically sophisticated intervention in Black music studies by reframing “the alternative” not as a marketing category but as a queer modality of musicking rooted in the ephemeral performance traditions of Black popular music and their particular resonance within Black queer communities. Brown traces this formation across decades of Black popular music, arguing that alt-R&B/hip-hop generates a holistic social practice that exceeds conventional genre boundaries and respectability politics. She draws on quare studies and Black feminist frameworks alongside theories of Black sonic and performative practice; a theoretical architecture the committee found both ambitious and carefully integrated. Brown’s ethnographic fieldwork in Philadelphia’s overlapping alt-R&B/hip-hop and jazz scenes has surfaced unreleased jam sessions and studio recordings involving the Soulquarians, the Roots, and Erykah Badu, materials she plans to digitize and deposit for broader community access. Her status as a working musician and former music industry professional gives her rare ethnographic access to the interlocutors at the heart of her study, and the committee found this proximity to be a genuine analytical asset.

Proposed Dissertation Title: Sounding Unsettled in the Premodern West

The committee was impressed by the originality and intellectual rigor of Daniel Koplitz’s dissertation. By brining queer theory into conversation with late antique and medieval music history, the project addresses a major gap in musicological scholarship and reorients how scholars understand the formation of Western musical norms. Rather than searching anachronistically for modern identities in the distant past, the work develops an innovative methodology for tracing historical processes of marginalization through sound, discourse, and archival absence. Its focus on the Phrygian mode as an “ethno-sonic trope” offers a strikingly new account of how ideas of instability, deviance, and alterity shaped the very foundations of tonal and cultural concepts of musical “home.” The project also stands out for its interdisciplinary range, synthesizing music theory, literary studies, religious history, and queer studies. Equally compelling is Koplitz’s commitment to public scholarship, pedagogy, and archival recovery, demonstrating how rigorous historical research can transform contemporary understandings of belonging, representation, and musical tradition.

Proposed Dissertation Title: Crossing the Ionian Sea: Opera, Folk Song, and Colonial Culture in the Greek-Speaking Mediterranean, 1797–1850

The committee was impressed by Christina Colanduoni’s ambitious rethinking of nineteenth-century opera and Mediterranean musical culture through the understudied context of Ionian Islands. By centering on the Nobile Teatro di San Giacomo di Corfù, the dissertation challenges conventional nationalist histories of music that position Greece merely as the origin point of Western civilization or as a cultural periphery. Instead, it presents the Greek-speaking Mediterranean as a dynamic site of exchange, negotiation, and colonial entanglement among Greek, Italian, Ottoman, French, and British actors. Particularly innovative is the project’s use of travel writing, ephemera, and neglected archival materials to trace transnational musical networks that do not fit neatly within modern national boundaries. The dissertation also makes a significant methodological intervention by treating the Mediterranean not as marginal to European music history, but as a critical space through which concepts of modernity, empire, identity, and cultural sovereignty were actively contested and reshaped through musical performance and reception.

Proposed Dissertation Title: Intermedial Dialogues: Opera and Cinema in the New York Metropolitan Area, 1895–1940

Diana Maron Ignaczak’s dissertation, “Intermedial Dialogues: Opera and Cinema in the New York Metropolitan Area, 1895-1940,” reconstructs the “blind and jealous warfare” between operatic performance and cinema. In doing so it offers a thorough reimagining of the mediatic entanglements of early twentieth-century music as it traces the movements of celebrity vocalists between the operatic stage and the silver screen. In doing so, it offers a powerful theoretical concept of “fractured performance” that recovers the multimedia distribution of operatic performance across varied technological domains.