Jessica Swanston Baker is a daughter of the Leeward Island Archipelago who works as an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago. Her first book, Island Time: Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis (University of Chicago Press, 2024), traces the sonic history of wylers, an up-tempo style of popular music from St. Kitts and Nevis that surged in popularity in the late 1990s. When she is not teaching, writing, or researching, she finds joy in all kinds of singing, mosaic crochet, and improvisational cooking.

Chris Batterman Cháirez is an ethnomusicologist from Mexico City. His current book project is an ethnographic study of the intercalations of Indigenous music and multicultural governance in Michoacán, Mexico. His second large-scale project is an ethnography of media ecosystems and cartel violence in rural Mexico. His work has received support from Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, among others, and his articles appear in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and Ethnomusicology. He was a professional jazz bassist in a past life. In the fall, he will begin an appointment as Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Fiona Boyd is a PhD Candidate in ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago and an interdisciplinary scholar of twenty-first-century radio and popular music. Her dissertation examines radio’s soundings in musical production and performance and asks how the medium’s contemporary resonances shape meanings and experiences of place, belonging, and community. Fiona’s research has been supported by the Society for American Music, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She serves on the Graduate Student Council of the Radio Preservation Task Force of the National Recording Preservation Board, as well as the executive board of the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies.

Chelsea Burns is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Butler School of Music and Affiliate Faculty at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, both in the University of Texas at Austin. Her work in country music addresses identity and instrumentality in relation to music analysis, suggesting that such contexts can radically affect analytical interpretation. Her scholarship has appeared in Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, Twentieth-Century Music, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Súmula: Revista de teoría y análisis musical, and Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy. Her forthcoming book, The Exotic Self: Mexican and Brazilian Modernists Abroad and at Home is scheduled for publication this year by Oxford University Press.

Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, Associate Professor of Music at Temple University, specializes in interdisciplinary studies of popular and folk music. She has an ongoing interest in the uses and limitations of categories in making, disseminating, and understanding music. Her study of musical media and discourse takes shape through critical, ethnographic, analytical, and historical methods. Her book Queer Country (University of Illinois Press, 2022), winner of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music’s Woody Guthrie Award, examines country and Americana through queer and transgender participation, by exploring themes of sincerity, genre, journey, rurality, representation, and collaboration. It was noted as one of the year’s best books about music by Variety, Pitchfork, No Depression, The Boot, and Ticketmaster.

Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He has written or co-edited books on the ringtone industry (The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form, 2013), mobile music studies (The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, 2014, with Jason Stanyek), and the music of Steve Reich (Rethinking Reich, 2019, with Pwyll Ap Siôn). He is the leader of the independent Americana band The Gated Community.

Nadine Hubbs is a musicologist, historian, and theorist of music and society and professor of women’s and gender studies and music at University of Michigan. She has published on topics ranging from Bernstein to queer disco to Taylor Swift; two award-winning books, The Queer Composition of America’s Sound and Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music; and the award-winning co-edited collection Uncharted Country: New Voices and Perspectives in Country Music Studies. Her public-facing work features in outlets including the New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, BBC, and Dolly Parton’s America. Her current book project is Border Country: Mexico, America, and Country Music.

Travis A. Jackson is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Chicago, where he teaches courses focused on jazz, popular musics, recording technology and issues of space and race, among other things. He is the author of the book Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Scene, and he’s currently completing the research for a project focused on Mark Hollis and Talk Talk as well as working on a long-in-gestation project on post-punk music and graphic design in the United Kingdom from 1977 to 1984.

Dr. Jacob Kopcienski (He/They) is an Assistant Professor of Musicology in the Hayes School of Music at Appalachian State University. Their research uses archives, ethnography, and pop music analysis to examine queer/trans performance and cultural organizing in the United States. Dr. Kopcienski has presented at the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the International Association for Popular Music Studies-US, the International Country Music Conference, the Appalachian Studies Association, and the Society for Applied Anthropology. They have publications in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of Appalachian Studies, and on I Care if You Listen.

Jocelyn Neal is Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  She holds an MA and PhD from the Eastman School of Music. Her research addresses country music, music and social dance, songwriting, and music theory pedagogy. Her books include Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History (Oxford University Press) and The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers:  A Legacy in Country Music (Indiana University Press).  She has also published in Musical Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Music Theory Spectrum. Dr. Neal directs the UNC Bluegrass Initiative, which she founded in 2016.

Rumya S. Putcha is an associate professor in the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies and in the Hugh Hodgson School of Music at the University of Georgia. Her research interests center on colonial and anti-colonial thought, particularly around constructs of knowledge, the body, and the state. Her first book, The Dancer’s Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke University Press, 2023), develops a transnational feminist approach to Indian performance cultures. Her second book project, “Ecologies of Yoga: Somatic Orientalism and Imaginations of India,” extends her work on transnational performance cultures to critical histories of science and medicine. 

Francesca T. Royster is Professor of English at DePaul University in Chicago, and received her PhD in English from University of California, Berkeley. She’s written scholarly work on Shakespeare, Black Lesbian Country music fans, and Prince, among other topics.  Her book, Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions was recently awarded the 2023 Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.  Her other books include Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon  ( 2003), Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (2013), and Choosing Family: A Memoir of Queer Motherhood and Black Resistance ( 2023).  

Anna Schultz is Associate Professor and Chair of Music at the University of Chicago. As an ethnomusicologist and cultural historian, the twin issues animating her research are music’s power to activate profound religious experience and suture communities, and music as power, that is, music’s role in structuring and dismantling caste, race, gender, nation, and class. Her first book, Singing a Hindu Nation, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Her second book, Echoes of Translation: Audibility and Relationality in Indian Jewish Women’s Song, is forthcoming with OUP. Schultz also writes on race, place, and gender in American country music.

Stephanie Shonekan is Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities and professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland. Previously was a faculty member and administrator at the University of Missouri and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Shonekan earned a doctorate in ethnomusicology and folklore with a minor in African American studies in 2003 from Indiana University Bloomington. Her dual heritage combining West Africa with the West Indies allows her to straddle the Black world comfortably. She has published articles and book chapters on afrobeat, Fela Kuti, Nigerian and African American hip-hop, soul music and country music. Her publications explore the nexus where identity, history, culture and music meet. Her books include The Life of Camilla Williams: African American Classical Singer and Opera Diva (2011), Soul, Country, and the USA: Race and Identity in American Music Culture (2015), Black Lives Matter & Music (2018), Black Resistance in the Americas (2018), and Dear Department Chair: Letters from Black Women Leaders to the Next Generation (2023). 

Amy Skjerseth is Assistant Professor of Popular Music at the University of California, Riverside. Her scholarship focuses on intersections of music, media, material culture, and technology. She is currently working on two monographs: Instrumental Presets: The Visible History of Pop Music (under contract with University of California Press) and The Feminist Wall of Sound. Her work has appeared in journals from The Journal of Popular Music Studies to The Radio Journal and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. She has led several public-facing conferences and initiatives, including Tay Day: Liverpool’s Version and the Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies.

Jada Watson is an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities in the School of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is the lead researcher of SongData, research program focusing on representation and systemic racial and gender inequity on radio programming and popularity charts in the US and Canada. This serves a larger interest in understanding how genre cultures and communities form, develop and change over time. Her research was cited in a brief filed with the US Federal Communications Commission in response to the National Association of Broadcasters’ proposal for additional ownership deregulation, in the Grammy Recording Academy’s Report on Inclusion and Diversity, and in the Black Music Action Coalition’s industry report on racism in the country music industry. She was a research partner on CMT’s EqualPlay initiative, and recently released a report on representation across all radio formats in Canada in partnership with Women in Music Canada and the National Arts Centre.

Emily Williams Roberts is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago; previously, she received her M.M. from the University of Tennessee Knoxville. She is conducting her dissertation research on the nuances of inclusion and belonging in participatory bluegrass gatherings. This research builds on her past projects, which sought to document how disability and accommodation play out in the jam session. Emily is deeply influenced by disability studies, and advocates for disability rights within academia, including by serving on the board of the Deaf and Disability Studies SIG in various roles, including as chair.