Lauren Ninoshvili
BA in Music and Russian Regional from Barnard College, 2002
M.A., M.Phil. in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University, 2005, 2006
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(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.  read more »

(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.  read more »

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

(BA: New York University 1992, MA and MPhil, Columbia University) wrote her Masters thesis, "African Cuban Sacred Music in Performance: Felipe García Villamil and Grupo Emikeké of New York," on the relationship between ritual space and African Cuban liturgical music in the North American urban context. Her dissertation in progress is an exploration of a Haitian immigrant processional genre that serves to affirm shifting ethnic, religious and class identities in the Dominican Republic. It is entitled "Gaga in the Dominican Republic: The Construction of Identities through Performance." Her interests include ritual musics of the African diaspora and transnational musics in the context of migration within the Caribbean region, and Caribbean immigration to the United States.  read more »

(BA in Geology, with additional concentration in Medieval and Renaissance English literature, from Amherst 1994; MS in Geology from the University of Montana in Missoula 1997; MA in Music Theory from Columbia 2000 with emphasis on music cognition, musical genres, and interpretive improvisation) is currently, he is working toward his MPhil in ethnomusicology and is conducting research on musical communication and genre-formation within bluegrass and country music performance communities in New York City. For the past two years, he has been the teaching assistant for the Center for Ethnomusicology. When not troubleshooting computer networks or doing fieldwork, he can generally be found practicing the banjo.  read more »

(BA in Music History and Journalism from Loyola University; MA in Ethnomusicology, Columbia 2001; MPhil, Columbia, 2003) came to Columbia with a background in popular music journalism. Her MA thesis was entitled “Women Making a Scene: Marketing, Feminism, and Image in the New York City Rock Music Scenes”). She has served as a TA for the Music Humanities course at Columbia, and as an assistant editor for the Yearbook for Traditional Music She is currently conducting doctoral field research on the "Ladyfest" women's music festival in the Pacific Northwest. She recently presented a paper on the critical reception of the music of Courtney Love and the band Hole at the 2003 national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology.  read more »

has more than ten years of experience as a writer, editor, producer, and curator, specializing in new media including video, audio, and computer-based work. He has served as Executive Director, Program Director, and Artistic Director at many non-profit arts organizations, including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Harvestworks Media Arts, Inc., and the Headlands Center for the Arts. While Editor of Tellus, the Audio Magazine, he was producer for several compact disc compilation recordings of experimental music and sound art. As a musician, he has performed his own and others' works at numerous venues including the Knitting Factory, CBGB?s, Merkin Hall, and Roulette in New York City. His work as a media artist (videomaker as well as sound designer for video and live performance) has appeared in the Whitney Biennial (2002) and the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center (2002); has been purchased for the collection of the Jewish Museum (2001) in New York City; and won First Prize at the Leggera Film Festival in Italy (2000) as well as a Golden Gate Award Certificate of Merit at the San Francisco International Film Festival (2002). His Master's Thesis (2002) for the Ethnomusicology Program at Columbia University's was titled "Creation and Maintenance of Cultural Identity by Palestinian Musicians in New York City." As well as music of the Middle East, he also specializes in translocal popular musics and their various mediations.  read more »