Gonzalez, Melissa

July 25, 2008 by MelissaGonzalez

(A.B. magna cum laude from Barnard College, in 2000 with a major in Ethnomusicology; M.A. in Music from Columbia University, 2003). In her Master’s Thesis, Welcome to the Thunderdome: Socio-Musical Conflict and the Search for Respect in the New York City Latin Jazz Scene, Melissa examines how conflict is represented and articulated in musical style and performance practice. Through an analytical examination of the production of genre ideology from multiple perspectives, she argued that musical genre, as a communicative field of action associated with recurrent discourses and practices, is a useful conceptual framework that uncovers the particular ways in which Latin jazz musicians situate themselves in the scene politically, socially, and creatively. She presented a paper based on this research at the 2005 national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Melissa’s current research interests include music and cultural policy, intellectual property, genre theory, popular music studies, and the musics of Latin America and the Latin American diaspora. She is a Columbia Teaching Fellow and has received predoctoral fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Ford Foundation. She is currently developing a dissertation project on the simultaneous commercialization and folklorization of Panamanian música típica. Melissa’s dissertation research is being supported by a Columbia University GSAS Travel Fellowship, an SSRC-Mellon Predoctoral Research Grant, a field research grant from the Institute of Latin American Studies, and a Ford Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship.
Email: mg293@columbia.edu

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