2026 Mid-Atlantic Chapter Election: The Candidates

Lily Kass, President

Lily Kass is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator whose work focuses on the diverse ways in which musical and theatrical works are reimagined, adapted, and translated to meet the needs of new audiences. She earned an A.B. in Literature from Harvard University in 2010, and a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017.

Lily is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Swarthmore College for the 2025-2026 academic year, and she continues to teach courses for the Peabody Institute of Music. As Opera Philadelphia’s Scholar in Residence since 2021, Lily provides educational content in the form of lectures, program notes, and listening guides for all of Opera Philadelphia’s audience members from schoolchildren to adults. In addition, Lily is a trained coloratura soprano and sings as a Marian Anderson Scholar Artist with the National Marian Anderson Museum and Historical Society.

Micaela Baranello, Vice President

Micaela Baranello is assistant professor of musicology at Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance. She has a long history with mid-Atlantic chapter institutions, including a BA in Music from Swarthmore College and an MA and PhD in musicology from Princeton (which is perhaps more like mid-Atlantic adjacent, no one knows for sure). Micaela is a specialist in Viennese operetta and contemporary opera staging as well as an active music critic. Her book The Operetta Empire was published by the University of California Press and she is now working on a book about Regietheater. She has also taught at Swarthmore, Smith College, and the University of Arkansas; at the latter, among other things, she helped reform the entire musicology curriculum and served with the AMS Southwest Chapter. She has served on the AMS Council and is a board member and review editor of Opera Quarterly. Her other passions include film, public transportation, and the fiber arts.

Daniel Carsello, Secretary-Treasurer

Daniel Carsello recently completed his Ph.D. in music with a music studies concentration at Temple University. He also holds an MM in Music History from Temple and a BA in Music from the University of Pennsylvania. Daniel’s dissertation examines the construction of hegemonic white masculinity in the United States through performances of imagined Blackness that, through blackface minstrelsy, were created and solidified in the nineteenth century and, through its legacies, have continued to be performed and developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He will be an adjunct professor at Goucher College this spring. As a graduate student at Temple, Daniel served on the THEMUS board in multiple roles. Some of his proudest achievements were overhauling the organization’s governing documents and planning its tenth anniversary conference. He would relish the opportunity to help the newly revived chapter re-establish governing practices and precedents.

Sophia Cocozza, Student Chapter Representative to Council

Sophia Cocozza is a Ph.D. candidate in Music Studies (Historical Musicology) at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores the intersections of sound, performance, and materiality, with a focus on avant-garde installation art, multisensoriality, and disability studies. Her dissertation examines transitional exchanges between North America and Italy from the 1960s to the 1990s and considers how these works shape embodied listening and accessibility. She holds an M.A. in Musicology from Tufts University and a B.A. in Music and English with a Museum Studies concentration from Boston College. Her curatorial and arts experience includes gallery education and programming at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Penn, exhibition research and design at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and McMullen Museum of Art, and organizing concert series at both Penn and Boston College. She is glad to be part of the effort to revive the AMS Mid-Atlantic Chapter and looks forward to helping cultivate a collaborative regional community!