Current Graduate Students in Musicology

Current Graduate Students in Musicology

Justin Balcor, PhD student

Justin Balcor is a PhD candidate in musicology and holds a BA in Music (Percussion) from Berea College, an MME (Music Education) from Eastern Kentucky University, and an MA in Musicology and Ethnomusicology from the University of Kentucky. Justin has previously served as the director of the African Drum Ensemble at Centre College (Danville, KY), Kentucky Refugee Ministries’ Children’s Choir, and SambaLEX in Lexington, KY. Justin is a former FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) Fellow and has also received a research award for the American Councils Combined Research and Language Training program in Tbilisi, Georgia. His doctoral work focuses on musical instruments, national/gender identity, and musical constructions of masculinity in the Republic of Georgia, with a secondary emphasis on Sub-Saharan African music performance and pedagogy, particularly Ewe percussion and Zimbabwean mbira. Justin has given presentations at annual conferences for Society for Ethnomusicology and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies on topics such as race and power. Currently, he is the District World Music Instructor for Fayette County Public Schools in Lexington, Kentucky where he leads middle and high school World Music ensembles and teaches middle school ethnography.

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Kirsten Barker, PhD student

Kirsten Barker is a PhD student at the University of Illinois. She holds a Master of Music in musicology from the University of Illinois and a Bachelor of Music in violin performance with a minor in environmental studies from Utah State University. At Utah State University, she received the Joyce Kinkead Outstanding Honors Capstone Award for her lecture recital and essay titled “Pastoralism, Loss, and Nostalgia: Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending as an Elegy for Environmental Disruption.” Kirsten’s research centers on musical depictions of landscape and nature, particularly Western art music that evokes connotations of the idea of “wilderness.” She is primarily interested in music and culture related to the Antarctic region, to the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, as well as to British perceptions of and expectations for landscape and environment. Her PhD work builds on her master’s project, which used ecocriticism and environmental history to explore how the Antarctic compositions of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Peter Maxwell Davies embody a specifically British conception of wilderness. She has presented her work at regional and national conferences, including those of the American Musicological Society and the North American British Music Studies Association. Outside of music, Kirsten is an active member of the East Central Illinois Master Naturalist program where she participates in stewardship, outreach, and continuing education initiatives centered on the ecology of Central Illinois.

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Suzanne Basson, PhD student

Suzanne Basson (she/her) is from Johannesburg, South Africa and currently pursuing a PhD in Musicology as a Distinguished Humanities Fellow. She holds a BMus (vocal performance) from the University of Pretoria, an MM (vocal performance) from the University of Redlands, and an MA (musicology) and Graduate Certificate in Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies from the University of Oregon. Broadly, her research focuses on the role music played in the continuation of apartheid in South Africa. Her dissertation specifically examines how the apartheid state used music as propaganda on the state-controlled radio. In 2023, she presented her paper titled “Singing Settler Colonialism: A Musical” at CUNY’s Graduate Student in Music Conference.

Outside of musicology, Suzanne worked at the University Archives on the Doris Duke Native Oral History Revitalization Project (2023-2024). She presented a poster titled “Anthropology in the Archives: Ethical Considerations for Native Communities’ Anonymity” during the Society of American Archivists’ annual meeting in 2024.

Equally a scholar and organizer, Suzanne is a co-president of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), the labor union that represents graduate workers at UIUC, for the 2024-2025 academic year.

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Michael Broussard, PhD student

Michael Broussard, a PhD student in Ethnomusicology with a Graduate Minor in Heritage Studies, holds a BME (Music Education) from Louisiana State University and an MM (Musicology) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana, Michael’s doctoral research focuses on the role of oral history, collective memory, and sonic cultural expressions by people tied to the heritage of southwest Louisiana dance halls. His work interconnects sound studies and heritage studies to consider why sound is integral to remembrance and how people express senses of belonging to social spaces of dance hall life. In 2023, Michael gave a conference presentation at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music entitled “Negotiating Space in Les Bons Temps: Nostalgia and Belonging in Louisiana Dance Halls.” In October 2024, Michael presented his most recent case study at the Society for Ethnomusicology, “‘Them Floors are Gonna Cave in on You One Night’: From Sonic Storytelling to Heritage Futures of Louisiana Dance Halls.” Michael’s professional interests also extend beyond the university as he finds significant value through non-profit museums as places of public engagement. In Fall 2024, under the Country Music Foundation, he is on a leave of absence to work as the Hatch Show Print Education and Programs intern in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is collaborating with supervisors on best practices in public education pedagogy and providing historical research into Hatch Show Print’s 145-year history.

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Darren Chuang, PhD student

Darren Chuang is a first-year PhD student in Musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to this, he earned his BA in Chinese Literature from National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan), a dual MA in Arts and Humanities Education and Musicology from Taipei National University of the Arts, and an MPhil in Music Studies from Wolfson College, University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).

His current research intersects multiple disciplinary areas, including Musicology, Taiwan/East Asian Studies, and Gender Studies, positioning Taiwanese popular music within the broader East Asian context to explore how music shapes distinct expressions of Taiwanese masculinities. The findings from his master’s research, titled “Call Me by Your Music: Taike as Corporeal and Aural Compass for Navigating Taiwanese Masculinities in Post-Martial Law Taiwan—A Multi-Case Study,” were presented at the North American Taiwan Studies Association conference in 2024. Additionally, his recent articles focusing on Western art music were published in the Kuandu Music Journal in 2020 and 2023, respectively.

Beyond his academic pursuits, Darren is an enthusiastic French horn player, with a diverse performance background in world music, including Balinese and Central Javanese gamelan, samulnori, and Thai court music. Professionally, he works as a program notes writer and scriptwriter for music programs, and he has previously served as a pre-concert talk presenter and assistant conductor for high school wind bands.

Darren is the recipient of the Government Fellowship for Studying Abroad from the Ministry of Education, Taiwan.

Hailey Cornell

Hailey Cornell, MM student

Hailey Cornell is a 2nd-year musicology masters student who earned their bachelors degree in music education (BME) at Coastal Carolina University (2023). In addition to musicology, Cornell is also pursuing a graduate minor in Gender and Women’s Studies. Cornell’s prior work at Coastal Carolina University focused on founding the [Represent]atoire Project alongside mentor Dr. Eric Schultz. The project, which remains active, advocates for the diversification of standard collegiate repertoire lists by working closely with one living composer each year (past composers including Valerie Coleman and Amanda Harberg). Cornell was named a finalist for the prestigious Ronald D. Lackey Award in 2023, which recognizes significant student impact through service and leadership. Cornell’s work was featured in the International Clarinet Association’s The Clarinet, with a personal narrative titled “Repertoire as Representation.”

Cornell’s broad research interests include American popular music, queer ballroom culture, ballroom rap, hip hop discourse, and queer nightlife. Most of Cornell’s work revolves around queer sound studies, with current research focusing on queer-coding within Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE album and subsequent tour performances. Their project entitled “Amplifying the Unseen: Examining the Impact of Commentators in Queer Ballroom Culture and their Influence on Ballroom Rap” was selected for a Queer Theory Symposium at UIUC in Spring 2024. Outside of queer sound studies, they hope to explore collaborative scholarship avenues in the near future.

Cornell is an active member of both the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology.

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Katlin Harris, PhD student

Katlin Harris is a PhD candidate in musicology who studies the cultural history of music in the United States with a focus on American wind bands. Her research interests also include historiography as well as the intersections between music, labor, and capitalism. Her dissertation research situates the sponsorship of wind bands by American industries between the two World Wars as part of the larger dynamic between business and organized labor in the early twentieth century. She has presented her research at meetings of the Society for American Music and the Southern Chapter of the American Musicological Society. Her writing has appeared in the Bulletin for the Society of American Music. She has given pre-concert talks for the University of Illinois Wind Symphony and the University of Illinois Wind Orchestra. In 2023, she was the recipient of the Nicholas Temperley Dissertation Award, and from 2020–23, she held a Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities and Arts.

In addition to her research and teaching, Katlin coordinates a series of recorded pre-concert interviews in association with the University of Illinois Department of Bands. She is also the author of program notes for the Danville Symphony Orchestra. She holds a M.M. in musicology from Louisiana State University and a B.M. in flute performance from Methodist University.

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Colin Hochstetler, MM student

Colin Hochstetler is a master student in musicology at UIUC, where he is supported with the Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities & Arts. He holds a B.M. in Music History and Literature from Bowling Green State University (BGSU). Colin’s research is centered around music and science communication with a focus on music in historical planetarium programs, space music, and sonification. He has carried out ethnographic research at planetariums throughout the Midwest and recently conducted archival research at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, IL.

Colin has presented original research papers at conferences for the American Musicological Society’s Midwest Chapter (AMS-MW) as well as the Great Lakes Planetarium Association. He has also been invited to give private and public talks, recently being a featured presenter for the Eclipse Speaker Series hosted in the planetarium at BGSU. In 2024, Colin received the Outstanding Student Paper Prize from the AMS-MW, the Indiana University Press Student Paper Award, and the Budds Student Award for his paper titled “Establishing Musical Aesthetics in Planetarium Productions: Classical Music and the Space Race at the Adler Planetarium,” a culmination of research which was supported by the Center for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship and Pro Musica at BGSU.

Alongside his musicological endeavors, Colin also explores librarianship and performance. He recently worked as the Polka Preservation Assistant at the Music Library and Bill Schurk Sound Archives at BGSU, was an Ensemble Library Intern at Interlochen Center for the Arts in 2023, and plays accordion in a polka band.

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Brady Hughes, PhD student

Brady is currently pursuing a PhD in Musicology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he also earned a Master’s in Musicology (with a final research paper titled “From Broadway to Málaga: Antonio Banderas and the Teatro del Soho CaixaBank”) and a BA in Spanish and Global Studies with a certificate in Global Security. His research interests include musical theater, popular music, and transnational flows of culture. Brady also works on campus as a senior academic advisor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. He is an active collaborative pianist, vocal coach, and music director, and frequently performs throughout Illinois.

As an undergraduate research assistant, Brady studied youth activism and issues relating to race and diversity in higher education. He spent a semester abroad in Granada, Spain, and also participated in a faculty-led program in the Bahamas that focused on sustainability. In his free time, Brady enjoys cooking, baking, traveling, and reading.

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Samantha Lampe, PhD student

Samantha Lampe (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the musicology program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation, titled “What I Did for Love: Broadway and the ‘I Love New York Campaign’ (1977–1983),” examines how the New York State Department of Commerce utilized Broadway musicals in commercials and travel packages for the tourism campaign to generate funds for the government. Her research interests include Broadway musicals, music tourism, the popular music industry, and music in urban spaces.

Samantha was a recipient of the Larry J. Hackman Residency at the New York State Archives, the Nicholas Temperley Research Fellowship, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Dissertation Travel Grant. She has published in Studies in Musical Theatre, and she is contributing a chapter to the forthcoming edited volume Rodgers and Hammerstein in Context (Cambridge University Press). She has presented at national and international conferences, including the American Musicological Society, the International Society for the Study of Musicals, the Society for American Music, and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Academic associations have recognized her research with the Oxford University Press Graduate Student Prize (Honorable Mention) from the International Society for the Study of Musicals, the Student A-R Editions Award from the American Musicological Society, and the Bruce Kirle Memorial Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. She received her master’s degree in musicology from Northwestern University in 2018.

Outside of studying, Samantha plays cello in Illini Strings and participates in figure skating shows and competitions.

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Jorge L. Mercado Méndez

Jorge L. Mercado Méndez, PhD student

Jorge L. Mercado Méndez is a third-year Ph.D. student and an Aspire Fellow. Jorge holds a double BA in Music and History from the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras (2019), and an MA in Ethnomusicology from Kent State University (2022). His thesis studied the perspective of Caribbean Hispanic vaporwave producers by analyzing the music scene through subjective spatiality and the cultural context reflected in the music. Outside the academic field, Jorge performed as a tubist with notable acts from Puerto Rico in various musical genres such as rock, salsa, jazz, and plena. At the same time, co-produced and co-hosted a public radio show in Radio Universidad by interviewing nationally and internationally renowned musicians from Puerto Rico. Currently, his research interest focuses on the impact of United States Armed Forces in the music of Puerto Rico intersecting fields of studies such as concert bands, military, power, colonialism, and Caribbean music.

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Mel Bialecki Miller, PhD student

Mel Bialecki Miller is a PhD candidate studying ethnomusicology with a minor in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation research on Ukrainian popular music, supported by an American Councils Title VIII Research Scholar fellowship, explores the variety of roles musicians play to support, disseminate, and perpetuate Ukrainian culture in the context of the Russian invasion. She is especially interested in how Ukrainian folk idioms are employed in popular music, and how musicians challenge and re-shape ideas about gender during wartime. In 2023, she completed eight months of fieldwork in Warsaw, Poland, where she attended Ukrainian concerts and spoke with artists and diasporic audiences about the role of music during the war. She has received Foreign Language and Area Studies scholarships to study both Ukrainian and Russian, and has studied Polish through the support of American Councils. For many years, she participated in UIUC’s Balkan music ensemble, Balkanalia. Additionally, she has served as co-chair of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Special Interest Group for Musics in and of Europe (2023-25), and an editorial assistant for Slavic Review (2021-22 and 2023-25). In her spare time, she likes to play sci-fi/fantasy RPGs and watch horror films.

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Maia Williams Perez, PhD student

Maia Williams Perez is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the University of Illinois (U-C), where she studies how the early music revivals of 19th-century England address issues of nationalism and domestic culture. Her master’s thesis at Boston University focused on period instruments and material culture’s role in Arnold Dolmetsch’s performances, and her dissertation explores Victorian instrument collectors and their influence on later revivals and organology. In her research, she enjoys engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship to contextualize musical performance within broader socio-political and cultural contexts. She has presented her work at multiple conferences, including conferences from the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association and North American Victorian Studies Association, and will be presenting at the American Musicological Society’s annual conference in 2024.

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Aubrie Powell, PhD student

Aubrie Powell is a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana in music studies. Her dissertation work is on song co-writing and band collaboration to understand creative community development linked to genre, place, and health. Her interdisciplinary work engages with the public humanities and Arts-Based Research to make songwriting a personal and community resource. Aubrie has a Master of Music Composition from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a Masters with a concentration in musicology from the University of New Mexico. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with a jamming community in Bosque Farms, New Mexico, and her master’s thesis, “NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Series: Vocalities of Outrage and Acts of Gaiety,” explores political performance on the National Public Radio online series.

 Aubrie has written over fifty songs and co-written with over fifteen songwriters. She is the site coordinator at the Songs of Sardinia songwriting workshop in Santu Lussurgiu, facilitated by anthropologist Kristina Jacobsen. In Champaign-Urbana, she participates regularly in the Country Music Ensemble facilitated by Dyke Corson at the Community School for the Arts in Urbana. She plays electric guitar and violin with the Philo Country Opry and the Recliners, a Patsy Cline tribute band.

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Danielle Sekel, PhD student

Danielle Sekel is a Ph.D. student in musicology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she also serves as the Outreach and Programming Coordinator at the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center (REEEC). She arrived at Illinois in 2017 to pursue a master’s degree in musicology, focusing her research on Bosnian hip hop as an oral tradition and the intergenerational, mass-mediated discourse of hip hop artists in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In her doctoral research, Danielle explores the intersections of industrial and ethnic heritage within the music of Slavic-American communities in the (post-)industrial anthracite coal mining region of Northeast Pennsylvania. At Illinois, she has furthered her studies in advanced Bosnian and Bulgarian, supported by Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships through REEEC and the European Union Center.

Danielle holds a B.A. degree in music and literary studies from Roanoke College. Prior to her time at Illinois, she taught music and literature at the middle and high school levels in South Carolina and has developed curricula for and taught at summer programs at the American University in Bulgaria and Wyoming Seminary College Preparatory School in Pennsylvania. At REEEC, she assists in the development, planning, organizing, and implementation of the Center’s outreach and programming activities. With nearly a decade of experience working with K-12 and university-level students and educators, Danielle is committed—both as a scholar and an administrator—to creating and disseminating accessible educational materials that both deepen understanding and encourage critical thinking.

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Walter Stedman, PhD student

Walter Stedman is a first year PhD student in musicology. He holds a Master of Arts degree in musicology from the University of Maryland, College Park and a Bachelor of Music degree in music history from the University of the Pacific. Walter is interested in music of the long nineteenth century, both zoomed in to early Romantics, particularly Felix Mendelssohn, and zoomed out to ideas of classical music and canon. Reception is a methodology of particular interest and influences both his work on nineteenth-century and popular music. He is interested in both American and Japanese popular music, particularly Japanese city pop and its revival. He presented “Crossing the Language Barrier: Musical Elements of the City Pop Revival” at the Retrofuturism 2.0 symposium in 2023 and will be publishing this work as part of the edited collection City Pop Cartographies: Musical Landscapes, Cultural Dynamics, and Nostalgia (forthcoming). In 2019, he presented his senior thesis “Felix Mendelssohn’s Forgotten Overture: Märchen von der Schönen Melusine” at the Pacific Undergraduate Research and Creativity Conference. As a trombonist, Walter explored many facets of performing arts from symphony orchestras to wind bands, jazz bands, athletic bands, and musical pit orchestras. In his free time, he enjoys cooking and baking, and partakes in sci-fi and fantasy media.

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Alexandra Yaralian, PhD student

Alexandra Yaralian is a first-year doctoral student in Musicology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests focus on music and genocide, intergenerational trauma, violence and conflict, and politics and protest in Armenia and Armenian diasporic communities in the United States. She received her B.A. in Ethnomusicology from the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music with a minor in Music Industry and her M.A. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her M.A. thesis, “Musical Narratives of Resistance: Armenian Revolutionary Songs in the Armenian Youth Federation of Washington, D.C.,” is an ethnographic study exploring the role of Armenian revolutionary songs among Armenian youth in Washington, D.C. In 2023, she presented her paper “Repurposing Songs for a Revolution: Patriotic Songs of Armenia” at the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting. Her forthcoming article “War and Collective Memory: Reimagining Armenian Patriotic Songs for the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War” will appear in a special issue of Baltic Worlds in 2025. Alexandra plays the kanon (qanun), is a vocalist, and enjoys performing Armenian folk songs with her sister, Lilia. Her studies at UIUC are supported by the Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities and Arts.

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Lilia Yaralian, PhD student

Lilia Yaralian is a first-year doctoral student in Musicology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her current research involves music and commemoration as an evocation of collective memory and trauma emanating from the 1915 Armenian genocide and the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War and music’s role in identity retention among members of the Armenian diaspora in the United States. Lilia received her B.A. in Ethnomusicology with a minor in Music Industry from the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and her M.A. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland, College Park. For her master’s thesis, “Avian Motifs in Armenian Music: An Exploration of Intergenerational Memory, Trauma, and Identity in the Armenian Diaspora,” she interviewed six Armenian American women from diverse cultural and educational backgrounds to explore individual interpretations of Komitas Vardapet’s song “The Crane” (“Krunk”) as it relates to identity, intergenerational trauma, and a shared collective past. She presented part of her thesis at the 2023 Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting. Lilia plays the kanon (qanun) and sings, and enjoys performing traditional Armenian music with her sister, Alexandra. She is a recipient of the University’s Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities and Arts.