I was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, and when I was ten I began to dedicate myself to the four instruments that I still consider my primary instruments: trumpet, guitar, voice, and piano. At that age, my family moved to Atlanta, GA where I was raised in the traditional music communities of Sacred Harp singing (pictured above), Old Time music, and Contradancing. These experiences put me in touch with ethnomusicologists and musicians studying diverse music genres from an early age, which would eventually lead me to complete a PhD in ethnomusicology at UC Berkeley in 2018. In 2020, I began a six-year postdoctoral position in Lisbon, Portugal, as an Integrated Researcher in the Instituto de Etnomusicologia-música e dança (INET-md) at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
My academic work broadly explores the political impacts of participatory festive practices in the Lusophone World and, more broadly, the Atlantic World. While the publications resulting from my research have become increasingly diverse, underlying them is an interest in understanding how communities transform traditional practices with an ethical aspiration to challenge the status quo.
With a background in Romance languages having completed a BA in French and Music at Reed College in 2007, I focused on music in Brazil for my doctoral dissertation, which is the basis of my book, Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro (Wesleyan University Press, 2022). Critical Brass focuses on the vibrant community of carnival brass bands in contemporary Rio de Janeiro that has come to view itself as an activist movement during a recent period of tremendous political crisis. I have published related research on brass bands in Brazilian protests in the Latin American Music Review (2020); the capitalist industries of carnival music classes (Journal of Popular Music Studies 2019); the postnationalist aesthetics of Rio's carnival (Luso-Brazilian Review 2019); a comparison between the carnivals of Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans of race and aesthetics (Ethnomusicology 2021); the campaign of carnival bands in Rio de Janeiro to convince revelers to stay at home in the pandemic (Journal of Festive Studies 2021); and efforts at inclusion of people with disabilities in Rio's carnival (Journal of Festival Inquiry and Analysis 2022).
I am currently working on a second book project, Musical Excess: Sentiments of Coloniality in Lisbon’s Brazilian Carnival. In this examination of an ex-colonial community in its historical metropole, I show how carnival plays a vital role in negotiating this postcolonial relationship in Lisbon, contributing more broadly to understanding the cultural impacts of postcolonial migration and cultural decolonization in European countries. The first output related to this project focused on the activist performance of Brazilian carnival groups during the Bicentennial celebrations of Brazilian Independence in Lisbon (Yearbook of Traditional Music 2023).
I have enjoyed working on other subjects, including on baby music classes in Lisbon as part of the city’s expat cultural infrastructure that contributes to its global gentrification (MUSICultures 2023); the organizational structure of Portugal’s associations that create “musical conditions of possibility” for brass bands to engage in transnational musical projects (submitted); the impacts of the pandemic in fortifying translocal musical communities (Music and Politics 2022); music’s role in direct action in San Francisco (At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice 2022); the governing structures of brass bands that practice consensus (Ethnomusicology Forum 2021); the ethics of cultural appropriation in a majority white brass band (HONK! 2020); and the degendering of North American contradancing, a tradition in which I was raised (Yearbook for Traditional Music 2019).
After my PhD, I have also been involved in a series of collaborative projects as a co-editor. At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice (Indiana University Press 2023) combines traditional ethnographies and autoethnographies reflecting on a global range of studies about music and social justice. This book won the 2023 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize and received an honorable mention for the 2023 Bruno Nettl Prize, both from The Society of Ethnomusicology. HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism (Routledge 2020) focuses on the movements and festivals of the global network of alternative brass bands known as HONK! of which the community I studied in Rio is a part. Most recently, I have begun working on Festival Activism (Indiana UP 2024), which will present a diverse range of case studies examining the transformational potentials of festivals, including a chapter examining an emerging focus in Rio de Janeiro on creating an anti-ableist carnival. In 2023, I began a position as one of two Editors-in-Chief of the interdisciplinary Journal of Festive Studies.
Beyond research, I have also organized conferences, including two meetings of the Northern California Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology as President of that organization (2020-22) and the international "Music of Carnival" conference (2021). At Nova, UC Berkeley, UC Davis and the Conservatory of Music and the University of the Pacific, I taught a wide range of courses, from undergraduate to doctoral level, such as ethnomusicology courses including Music and Activism, Carnival: Music and Subversion, Music in Brazil, Musics of the World, and Music in American Cultures, as well as other music courses, such as Western Music Survey, Musicianship, Music Theory, and Contemporary Music. At Nova, I advise theses and dissertations on diverse topics, such as an avant-garde festival in Lisbon, popular music during the austerity crisis in Portugal, and the learning of improvisation vocabularies in Portuguese jazz.
I have played in a wide range of styles and ensembles, including brass bands, jazz bands, contradance bands, Brazilian ensembles, early music choirs, Balkan brass bands, rock bands, Shapenote groups, cumbia bands, and more. My most successful musical endeavor has been co-founding San Francisco's Mission Delirium Brass Band, which has toured to Brazil, France, Spain, Hungary, Croatia, and New Orleans. See the music page of this website for more.
My academic work broadly explores the political impacts of participatory festive practices in the Lusophone World and, more broadly, the Atlantic World. While the publications resulting from my research have become increasingly diverse, underlying them is an interest in understanding how communities transform traditional practices with an ethical aspiration to challenge the status quo.
With a background in Romance languages having completed a BA in French and Music at Reed College in 2007, I focused on music in Brazil for my doctoral dissertation, which is the basis of my book, Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro (Wesleyan University Press, 2022). Critical Brass focuses on the vibrant community of carnival brass bands in contemporary Rio de Janeiro that has come to view itself as an activist movement during a recent period of tremendous political crisis. I have published related research on brass bands in Brazilian protests in the Latin American Music Review (2020); the capitalist industries of carnival music classes (Journal of Popular Music Studies 2019); the postnationalist aesthetics of Rio's carnival (Luso-Brazilian Review 2019); a comparison between the carnivals of Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans of race and aesthetics (Ethnomusicology 2021); the campaign of carnival bands in Rio de Janeiro to convince revelers to stay at home in the pandemic (Journal of Festive Studies 2021); and efforts at inclusion of people with disabilities in Rio's carnival (Journal of Festival Inquiry and Analysis 2022).
I am currently working on a second book project, Musical Excess: Sentiments of Coloniality in Lisbon’s Brazilian Carnival. In this examination of an ex-colonial community in its historical metropole, I show how carnival plays a vital role in negotiating this postcolonial relationship in Lisbon, contributing more broadly to understanding the cultural impacts of postcolonial migration and cultural decolonization in European countries. The first output related to this project focused on the activist performance of Brazilian carnival groups during the Bicentennial celebrations of Brazilian Independence in Lisbon (Yearbook of Traditional Music 2023).
I have enjoyed working on other subjects, including on baby music classes in Lisbon as part of the city’s expat cultural infrastructure that contributes to its global gentrification (MUSICultures 2023); the organizational structure of Portugal’s associations that create “musical conditions of possibility” for brass bands to engage in transnational musical projects (submitted); the impacts of the pandemic in fortifying translocal musical communities (Music and Politics 2022); music’s role in direct action in San Francisco (At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice 2022); the governing structures of brass bands that practice consensus (Ethnomusicology Forum 2021); the ethics of cultural appropriation in a majority white brass band (HONK! 2020); and the degendering of North American contradancing, a tradition in which I was raised (Yearbook for Traditional Music 2019).
After my PhD, I have also been involved in a series of collaborative projects as a co-editor. At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice (Indiana University Press 2023) combines traditional ethnographies and autoethnographies reflecting on a global range of studies about music and social justice. This book won the 2023 Ellen Koskoff Edited Volume Prize and received an honorable mention for the 2023 Bruno Nettl Prize, both from The Society of Ethnomusicology. HONK! A Street Band Renaissance of Music and Activism (Routledge 2020) focuses on the movements and festivals of the global network of alternative brass bands known as HONK! of which the community I studied in Rio is a part. Most recently, I have begun working on Festival Activism (Indiana UP 2024), which will present a diverse range of case studies examining the transformational potentials of festivals, including a chapter examining an emerging focus in Rio de Janeiro on creating an anti-ableist carnival. In 2023, I began a position as one of two Editors-in-Chief of the interdisciplinary Journal of Festive Studies.
Beyond research, I have also organized conferences, including two meetings of the Northern California Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology as President of that organization (2020-22) and the international "Music of Carnival" conference (2021). At Nova, UC Berkeley, UC Davis and the Conservatory of Music and the University of the Pacific, I taught a wide range of courses, from undergraduate to doctoral level, such as ethnomusicology courses including Music and Activism, Carnival: Music and Subversion, Music in Brazil, Musics of the World, and Music in American Cultures, as well as other music courses, such as Western Music Survey, Musicianship, Music Theory, and Contemporary Music. At Nova, I advise theses and dissertations on diverse topics, such as an avant-garde festival in Lisbon, popular music during the austerity crisis in Portugal, and the learning of improvisation vocabularies in Portuguese jazz.
I have played in a wide range of styles and ensembles, including brass bands, jazz bands, contradance bands, Brazilian ensembles, early music choirs, Balkan brass bands, rock bands, Shapenote groups, cumbia bands, and more. My most successful musical endeavor has been co-founding San Francisco's Mission Delirium Brass Band, which has toured to Brazil, France, Spain, Hungary, Croatia, and New Orleans. See the music page of this website for more.
