Recent Updates

I successfully completed my Ph.D. preliminary exams in December 2008. Glad to have those out of the way.

In May 2008 I completed my M.A. in ethnomusciology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My thesis, titled "Hearing War, Seeing Music: Violence, Aesthetics, and Technology in Online War Music Videos," was based on a yearlong, ethnographically-informed research project on war music videos, their creators and audiences. I plan to expand on this current research for my Ph.D. dissertation.

My article, "Free Jazz/Punk Rock," will be available in the forthcoming collection titled Nyuu jazu sutadizu [The New Jazz Studies] (Tokyo: Kirara shobou), co-edited by Micahel Molasky and Toshifumi Miyawaki. My essay addresses the intersections of the two seemingly disparate genres beginning in the late 1960s.

My current project interests include online military/war music videos; audiovision and violence; avant-garde jazz and the proto-punk movement; sound studies and ethnomuiscological theory; genres of free improvisation and Noise; post-bop jazz drumming; gender and violence in American balladry; and jazz, civil rights, and the black power movements.