Graduate Students

Stirr, Anna Marie

(B.A. in Music [flute performance] and Religious Studies, Lawrence University 2002; M.A. in Ethnomusicology, Columbia 2005). Anna's undergraduate work focused on music/sound in Hindu and Buddhist practice. Her M.A. thesis, "Conflict and Confluence: Constructing and Crossing Boundaries at the Ahiri Institute for Indian Music and Dance," examined Indian classical performers’ representation of Indian heritage in intercultural situations in New York City. Anna's dissertation project addresses the role of an emerging Nepali popular genre, dohori git, in rural-urban migrants' negotiation of gendered national identity. Work based on this research was presented at the 2006 meeting of IASPM-USA. Her research interests include Nepali and other Himalayan musics, media and circulation, performance theory, and the role of music and sound in development and social movements. Anna has been a Columbia Teaching Fellow and has received the FLAS for summer study of Nepali (2004), and the Columbia Summer Travel Grant for research in Nepal (2005). Her dissertation research is being supported by Fulbright-Hays and the Social Science Research Council.
Email: ams2110@columbia.edu  read more »

Sonevytsky, Maria

(BA in Slavic Regional Studies and Music, Barnard College, 2003) is interested in music in diaspora, particularly in processes of nostalgia and ideologies of authentic experience. Her undergraduate research focused on music of post-Soviet Ukraine, post-Communist Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary and the former Yugoslavia, culminating in a thesis on appropriations of folk symbology in post-Soviet Ukrainian rock and avant garde festivals. Currently, she is focusing on the Ukrainian diasporas of Brazil and Argentina. In addition to her ethnomusicologial pursuits, Maria performs many kinds of music on the accordion, piano, and oboe.
See Maria's Accordion project website
Email: ms2147@columbia.edu

Skinner, Ryan

(B.A. magna cum laude 2000, French and Francophone Studies, Carleton College; M.A. 2005, M.Phil. 2006, Ethnomusicology, Columbia University) studies music, aurality, postcoloniality, and urban culture in Mali, West Africa. Ryan has conducted extensive fieldwork in West Africa, Europe, and the United States, focusing on musical performance and listening practices among Mande peoples worldwide (view Ryan's CV here). In his Master’s Thesis, “Jeliya in New York City: An Ethnography of Space, Travel, and Practice in Urban America” (2005), Ryan discusses the interrelation of migratory experiences, musical expression, and cultural identity in the Mande diaspora of New York City. In his article, "Determined Urbanites: Diasporic Jeliya in the 21st Century" (Mande Studies Vol. 6, 2004), Ryan elucidates a modern "culture of travel" among West African musicians practicing an increasingly global tradition of praise singing, instrumental performance, storytelling, and dance known as jeliya. Ryan’s current dissertation fieldwork focuses on the musical politics and poetics of personhood in postcolonial Bamako, Mali. This work is supported by dissertation research fellowships from the Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Research Fellowship) and Wenner-Gren Foundation. Ryan will be in Mali from October 2006 to November 2007.
Email: rts2104@columbia.edu

Saibou, Marceline

(MM in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from the Hochschule für Musik, Köln, Germany 1995 with a thesis on "Traditional Forms of Music Making in the Cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa"; Certificate in African Studies from the Institute of African Studies at Columbia with a final research paper on "Cultural Nationalism in Guinea and Les Ballets Africains; 1947-1967;" MA and MPhil in Ethnomusicology from Columbia) wrote an MA thesis at Columbia entitled "African Dance in New York City - Constructing and Negotiating Identities"; MPhil 2002). Her areas of interest are West Africa and Afghanistan. She is currently conducting dissertation field research on urban popular music in Togo, West Africa. She served as TA for the Asian Music Humanities and the Western Music Humanities courses at Columbia, as well as an editorial assistant for the ICTM UNESCO collection project.
Email: ms829@columbia.edu

Ninoshvili, Lauren

(BA in Music and Russian Regional from Barnard College, 2002; M.A., M.Phil. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, 2005, 2006). Lauren Ninoshvili is currently preparing a dissertation on the use of vocables in contemporary Georgian folk-fusion music. Her fieldwork, carried out primarily in Tbilisi, was supported by an Individual Advanced Research Opportunities (IARO) grant from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX). Lauren has presented her work at academic conferences in the US and Europe. Her article, “Report from the Kitchen Sink: The Supra and the Seeds of a Georgian Feminism” appears in the edited volume Nation in Formation: Inclusion and Exclusion in Central and Eastern Europe (London: UCL-SSEES, 2007). Lauren’s research interests include the folk and sacred polyphony of the South Caucasus Republic of Georgia, language and music, translation theory, and the language of world music. She is book reviews editor for Current Musicology, Columbia’s peer-reviewed journal.
Email: ln2106@columbia.edu

Mangin, Timothy R.

(BA in music from Bowdoin; two years of MFA studies in world music and jazz at Cal-Arts; Certificate in African Studies from the Institute for African Studies at Columbia; MA and MPhil in Ethnomusicology from Columbia) wrote his MA thesis on "Giant Step: Innovation, Technology and Performance in a Jazz Inspired Dance Club" which examines the appropriation of a jazz ideology in an underground New York hip hop club.. He is currently writing a dissertation entitled "Senegalese Urban Popular Music: Jazz, Mbalax, and Rap" based on fieldwork in Senegal supported by the Ford Foundation, and holds a pre-doctoral writing fellowship at Saint Lawrence University. His academic service included research on the Malcolm X project at the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia. He was also a pre-doctoral fellow in the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on Globalizing City Cultures at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society and participates frequently in the activities of the Center for Jazz Studies. His review of the CD "Keepers of the Talking Drum" appeared on Ethnomusicology Online (EOL). He presented a paper based on his research in Senegal at the 2003 national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Email: trm8@columbia.edu  read more »

Luker, Morgan

(B.A. 2001, Music History, University of Wisconsin, Madison; M.A. 2003, M.Phil 2005, Ethnomusicology, Columbia University.)

Morgan’s research interests include cultural policy, the cultural industries, music and economic development, cultural tourism, transnationalism, aesthetics, and the uses of music history. He has conducted research on several musical genres, including contemporary Argentine tango, “downtown” improvised music, and world music. Morgan’s undergraduate work on avant-garde bassist and producer Bill Laswell received the Hilldale award for undergraduate research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His M.A. thesis, “Tonight at Tonic: Practicing Place in a New York Art World” (2003), examined how musical values were cultivated for non-institutionalized “high art” musics by a transnational avant-garde music community centered on the nightclub Tonic, and how that community made sense of the rapid economic transformation the neighborhood in which the club was physically and symbolically emplaced was then undergoing.

Morgan’s current dissertation research focuses on music and cultural policy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he will be conducting fieldwork until the fall of 2007. Taking contemporary tango as its case, this project concentrates on the contested interconnections between the activities of musicians who have self-consciously returned to tango as means of re-exploring and re-articulating their identities as Argentines following the 2001 economic crisis and the cultural policies of the city government of Buenos Aires which channel and promote tango as an economic resource for the city and its citizens, primarily through programs that aim to develop the local cultural industries and cultural tourism. An article on themusical side of this equation, “Tango Renovación: On the Uses of Music History in Post-Crisis Argentina,” will appear in the forthcoming issue of Latin American Music Review (28:1, Spring/Summer 2007). Morgan has presented his work at the annual meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), the American Anthropological Society (AAA), the US and Latin American branches of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and elsewhere. At Columbia, Morgan has served as the assistant editor of Current Musicology and as an instructor in the Music Humanities core course.
Email: mjl2003@columbia.edu  read more »

Lawry, Charles

(BA, University of Arizona, 2005)
Emai: cal2135@columbia.edu
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