Bio

Born in the UK, I obtained an undergraduate degree in music at Durham University and a Masters (MSt) from the University of Oxford. In 2003 I moved to the US to begin a PhD at Harvard. I graduated in 2010 with a dissertation entitled “‘Masters of the President’s Music’: Cold War Composers and the United States Government.”

Meanwhile, in 2007, I had moved to Canada and begun teaching at Western University (the University of Western Ontario) in London, Ontario. I have been at Western ever since, and was promoted to Associate professor with tenure in 2017.

My research has consistently focused on music and politics between World War II and today. In my book, The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War, I assessed the ways in which that ideological conflict shaped the quest to find a uniquely American sound in classical music. I looked at composers such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Virgil Thomson to consider how the Cold War shaped their lives, their careers, and their art. My work on this topic has received the Pisk Prize of the American Musicological Society (2007) and the Society for American Music’s Cambridge University Press Award (2015).

I have also explored the important question of how musical nationalism interplays with racial identity. An article on Ulysses Kay’s opera about slavery, Jubilee (1976), won both the Deems-Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award from the ASCAP Foundation (2014) and the Kurt Weill Prize from the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music (2015).

Presently, my research is taking me in a number of directions:

1. New explorations in Cold War music, its political ramifications, and their long-term effects for both classical and popular music.
2. A non-traditional biographical study of African American composer Ulysses Kay and civil rights activist Barbara Kay, that considers their marriage as a vehicle to understand some of the tensions and challenges within the middle class black community in the mid-20th century.
3. A collaborative, multidisciplinary, historical memory project examining the folk music of refugees from El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s.

I am currently Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Society for American Music.

Since 2019, I have been Assistant Dean of Research in the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western University. In this role, I represent Music in university-level conversations about research; assist my colleagues with their research careers, especially research funding applications; coordinate evaluation of faculty-level grant applications; evaluate university-level grants; oversee Music applications to Western’s postdoc programs and other research programs, as well as Canada Research Chair opportunities; and facilitate research promotion.

For an up-to-date copy of my CV, see here.