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Donate The AMS Board of Directors is pleased to announce the appointment of Tekla Babyak to the role of Director-at-Large. Babyak will serve as Director-at-Large on the AMS Board of Directors from November 2025 through October 2028.
Tekla Babyak holds a PhD in Musicology from Cornell University. She is currently based in Davis, CA, as an independent scholar and disability activist with multiple sclerosis (MS). Her research focuses on aesthetics, analysis, spirituality, and disability studies in nineteenth-century German and French music. Recent publications have appeared or are forthcoming in 19th-Century Music, Music Analysis, and Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and edited collections such as Rethinking Brahms (eds. Nicole Grimes and Reuben Phillips, OUP, 2022) and Joseph Joachim: Identities/Identitäten (eds. Katharina Uhde and Michael Uhde, Olms Verlag, 2024). Her current project is an autoethnography about her sexual attraction to nineteenth-century composers, such as Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. She theorizes this attraction in terms of her neuroqueer relationship to music as a disabled woman.
As a disability activist, Babyak serves on the Society for Music Theory’s Committee on Disability and Accessibility and is also Alternate Officer for the AMS Music and Disability Study Group. Central to her activist work is self-advocacy for her access needs. Due to her MS-related anxiety disorder, she needs a supportive, non-critical environment during her interactions with colleagues and students. In all of her professional activities, she requests accommodations for her anxiety when giving research talks and submitting manuscripts for publication. These access requests are a form of activism. Subverting ableist norms of confidence, Babyak strives to normalize–and honor–anxiety disclosure in professional spaces.
In addition to her research and activism, Babyak also works as a freelance developmental editor for academic books and articles. A passion of hers is to help authors discover the most original and promising arguments in their drafts; she enjoys suggesting primary and secondary sources to develop emerging ideas into compelling arguments. She is committed to offering encouragement and kindness to her freelance clients–a commitment that resonates with her own access needs.
Across all of her freelance work, professional service, and research projects, Babyak seeks to uplift disability as a meaningful identity. She is honored to be appointed for AMS Board service and to be an openly disabled leader.
