Presentations

  • “Salvadorian Revolutionary Music and its Influence on the Development of Social and Political Movements,” talk for the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies, University of Waterloo, October 6, 2022.
  • “Faith, Trauma, Resistance, and Resilience in the Revolutionary Songs of Civil War El Salvador”:
    • keynote for McGill University’s Music Graduate Symposium, March 18, 2022
    • invited presentation at 2ndo Congreso de Investiacion Cientifica de la Facultad de Humaninades y Artes, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras, November 30, 2022.
  • “Public Concerts and Public Life in Washington: A Panel Discussion on the 75th Anniversary of the Concert Series at Dumbarton Oaks,” hosted by Dumbarton Oaks (held online), panelist, November 18, 2021.
  • “Faith, Trauma, Resistance, and Resilience in the Revolutionary Songs of Civil War El Salvador”:
    • colloquium for Northwestern’s Bienen School of Music, October 2021.
    • keynote for McGill University’s Music Graduate Symposium, March 18, 2022.
  • “Beyond Objectivity: Embracing Activism in Scholarship and Teaching,” roundtable panelist, Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, November, 2021 (online).
  • “Decolonizing Trauma Studies in Music: Historical Memory and Civil War El Salvador,” Music, Sound and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, February 2021  (online).
  • “In Search of a Decolonial Approach to Music of Trauma,” Ibero-American Music Study Group, Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, November, 2020 (online).
  • “Resilience and Resistance in the Folks Songs of Civil War El Salvador: Paths to a Decolonial Research Practice”:
    • colloquium at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto. November 21, 2019
    • colloquium for the Music and Culture M.A. program and its Music and Culture Graduate Student Society, Carleton University, February 6, 2020.
  • “Bernstein in Moscow: Challenging Cold War Narratives as a Government-Funded TV Diplomat,” (Music, Dance, and Diplomacy Symposium, University of Kentucky,  2019).
  • “Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man: The Sound of American Exceptionalism,” (University of Kentucky, Symphonic Literature class, 2019).
  • “Individual Resilience; Collective Trauma: Musical Documents of Massacre in Civil War El Salvador (1979-92)”: (
    • SAM, 2019
    • Western Music colloquium series, 2019, alongside a presentation of Norberto Amaya [Songwriter]
    • 14th Convention of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Phnom Penh, 2019.
  • “Music, Memory, and Trauma in El Salvador’s Civil War Refugee Camps (1979-1992)” (Durham University Trauma Studies in the Medical Humanities Conference, 2018)
  • “Trump’s Playlist and Neoliberal Exceptionalism” (AMS, 2017)
  • “Cold War Politics, American Exceptionalism, and an Eastman-Juilliard Rivalry,” (The Juilliard School, 2017)
  • “‘Forbidden to Write a Melody’: Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Kaddish’ Symphony (1963) and the Cold War Style Wars” (SAM, 2017)
  • “Americanist Nationalism in the Cold: The Case of Roy Harris” (AMS, 2015)
  • “The Virtue of American Power and the Power of American Virtue: Exceptionalist Tropes in Early Cold War Musical Nationalism” (SAM, 2015) – awarded SAM’s Cambridge University Press Award.
  • “Cold War Cultural Diplomacy and the Changing Politics of Musical Style” (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2014)
  • “Musical Style, Cold War Ideology, and the American-Soviet Composers’ Exchange, 1958-60” (5th European Summer School on Cold War History, Trento, Italy, 2013)
  • “Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in Moscow: Educational Television, Diplomacy, and the Politics of Tonal Music”
    • Canadian University Music Society Conference, 2012
    • East West Cultural Exchanges and the Cold War Conference, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, 2012
    • AMS 2012
    • University of Michigan Interdisciplinary Music Forum, 2012
  • “Musicians as Rhetorical Surrogates in Eisenhower’s Cold War: Iceland, 1954-59: (SHAFR, 2012)
  • “Cultural Diplomacy to Mitigate Cultural Imperialism: Music in US-Icelandic Relations, 1954-58” (SAM, 2011)
  • “Ulysses Kay’s Jubilee and the Politics of Race During the American Bicentennial” (AMS, 2010)
  • “A Cold War Composer-Diplomat in the Civil Rights Era: The Case of Ulysses Kay”:
    • SAM, 2010
    • UWO American Studies speaker series, 2010
  • “William Schuman and an ‘Epistemic Community’ of Cold War American Composers” (Cultural and International History IV, Cologne, 2009)
  • “‘A Serious and Delicate Mission’: The Government-Funded European Tours of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, 1952-1968”:
    • “Crosscurrents,” 2009
    • UWO History Dept., 2009
  • “Composing Cultural Diplomacy—Globalizing American Music” (AMS Cold War Study Group, 2008)
  • “Composer Activism, The State Department’s Music Advisory Panel, and the Cold War Construction of a Musical Identity for the United States” (SAM, 2008)
  • “Aaron Copland and Cultural Diplomacy: ‘Un-American Composer Meets Cold War Ambassador”
  • “Shaping a Musical Identity for the United States: Cold War Cultural Diplomacy and the State Department’s Music Advisory Panel”:
    • Harvard, 2007
    • UWO, 2007
  •  “Cold War Copland: Television and Cultural Propaganda” (SAM, 2006)
  • “Aaron Copland and the American Dream: The Story of a Little-Known Television Career” (City University of New York Music Grad Conference, 2005)
  • (AMS – American Musicological Society; SAM – Society for American Music; ICMSN – International Conference on Music Since 1900; UWO – University of Western Ontario/Western University; SHAFR – Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations)
  • I also give pre-concert talks and public lectures on 20th-century music topics.
  • A public lecture I gave in November 2011 in London, Ontario as part of Western University’s “Classes without Quizzes” series on Music and the Cold War can be seen here.