Musicology Careers

Robert Dahlberg-Sears is a Part-Time Lecturer at Sophia University and Musashi University, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for International Educational Exchange in Tokyo, Japan. He also serves as Director of Communications for the Modern Japan History Association. He earned his PhD in Ethnomusicology in 2025 with a graduate interdisciplinary specialization in Folklore. His research focused on how punk/alternative musics and culture are used, coded, and commodified in Japan—essentially, "what does it mean to be 'punk' in Japan?" The people and research methods he encountered as a researcher now inform his teaching of highly diverse international students. He credits his pedagogical models at Ohio State for making this possible.

Elena Cruz-Lopez works as the Communications and Customer Experience Representative at The Loft Violin Shop. She also teaches violin and piano at Musicologie and organizes Tempo: Music & Arts Camp. At Loft, she researches and writes social media content, including educational posts on composers, string musicians, and products for string players. Cruz-Lopez earned her PhD in Musicology in 2024. Her dissertation explored how Motown Records' marketing strategies shaped fans' recollections of 1960s music and influenced the legacy of Motown in popular music history. Her research helped her prepare for Tempo’s fundraising and outreach efforts, as did her work with the Council of Graduate Students’ Arts & Culture Subcommittee.

Jacob Kopcienski is Assistant Professor of Musicology in the Hayes School of Music and Affiliate Faculty with the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University. He earned his PhD in Musicology in 2023, with a dissertation documenting LGBTQ music, performance, cultural organizing, and communities across Appalachia, the Midwest, and the South. They credit OSU’s program with providing hands-on pedagogical training that now informs their undergraduate teaching. The fieldwork and organizational skills they developed through their dissertation research also prepared them to coordinate a university public humanities program, connect with community stakeholders, write grants, and organize public events.

Wonseok Lee is a Postdoctoral Associate in East Asian Studies, a Lecturer in Music, and serves on the Council on East Asian Studies at the MacMillan Center for the International and Area Studies at Yale University. Before arriving at Yale, he taught as a Lecturer in Korean Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and at Bowling Green State University teaching “Introduction to Popular Culture.” Lee completed his PhD in 2023 in Musicology. His dissertation examined K-pop as a genre, not as a fixed concept bound to national identity, but instead as a signifier that operates in a global sphere. He found that the “K” of K-pop can take on multiple meanings and identities.

Katelin Webster completed her PhD in Musicology in 2023 with a dissertation on intercultural music-making and Syrian refugee integration in northern Germany. Her dissertation was supported by an AMS-50 Fellowship. She is the Philanthropy Coordinator at the Refugee Education Center in Grand Rapids, focusing on funding support, research, and grant writing. She also coordinated a drum workshop for the center’s after-school program. Webster credits her PhD training in data analysis and project management with enhancing the center's fundraising strategy. By writing grants, analyzing donor trends, and organizing events, she supports sustainable growth and ensures access to educational and resource navigation services for refugee families.

Phoebe Hughes is a Lecturer in Musicology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. She earned a PhD in Musicology in 2022 with a graduate interdisciplinary specialization in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation research focused on women in country music from the 1960s to the present. Hughes analyzed five different case studies of female country artists over a seventy-year period who have all worked at the edges of country music. She found that they used specific strategies to build careers, whether through stylistic choices within the format, bringing new audiences to the genre, or by creating a space for themselves outside of the genre.

Sophia Enriquez became an Assistant Professor of Music at Duke University after graduating in 2021 with a PhD in Musicology. Her dissertation research explored Latinx music, migration, and belonging in Appalachia. Enriquez studied how Latinx creative practices are increasingly visible and influential as Latinx Appalachians find meaningful ways to engage and blend Latinx and Appalachian musical traditions together. Her dissertation project developed her skills in participant-observation-based ethnographic research as well as archival methods, The result was an analysis that contributes to the richly interdisciplinary field of Appalachian studies.

Beth Owen earned her PhD in Music History from The Ohio State University in 2021. She works as an instructor of flute, piano, recorder, and Baroque flute at Southport Studios. With over 50 years of teaching experience, she has received several certifications from the Music Teachers National Association and the Ohio Music Teachers Association for her work. Owen’s dissertation focused on the interplay of orality and literacy in Hebrew Torah cantillation, considering how one informs the other throughout the long history of diaspora and Jewish liturgical cantillations.

Sarah Bishop provides music therapy and directs the activities program at a mental health rehabilitation center in California. She also offers workshops on music therapy for musicians and psychology students in Ethiopia. With a PhD in Musicology earned in 2020, Bishop researched the relationship between music, ethnicity, and violence in the Gambella region in Ethiopia. The project focused on two ethnic groups (Anywaa and Nuer) and how local music-making and interpretive frameworks of listening reflect, shape, and produce ethnicity within these contexts. Other research interests include music and violence, Protestant Christian music and movements across Africa, music and authoritarianism, and music and trauma.

Adam Buffington is a performer, composer, and founder of Mumbling Eye Record Label. He completed his PhD in Musicology in 2020 with a focus on experimentalism and transnationalism in twentieth-century Reykjavik, Iceland. Informed by archival and ethnographic research, and engaged with art historians, musicologists, and cultural anthropologists, his dissertation interrogated dominant narratives about new music through three case studies involving Icelandic and non-Icelandic artists. Buffington says his graduate training gave him writing and organizational skills that he uses often in running the record label and writing the liner notes for releases.

Norman (Michael) Goecke is the founder of Mucus-Free Life LLC, a health and wellness organization dedicated to educating the world about the Mucusless Diet Healing System. He also performs as a jazz trombonist with Prof. Spira & Brother Air: Fire Music Project. He graduated in 2016 with a PhD in Musicology, specializing in jazz studies. His dissertation research considered what is at stake in jazz education and described some of the principal formal and non-formal environments in which jazz music is learned today. Analyzing elements of jazz pedagogy, Goecke advocated for the revitalization and reorientation of jazz education and its cultural spaces.

Katherine Leo teaches at Millikin University in Illinois as an Assistant Professor of Music. She graduated with a PhD in Musicology in 2016, focusing on the history of copyright litigation. Leo’s dissertation research examined court records and judicial opinions on prominent music-related cases chronologically from the mid-nineteenth century through recent lawsuits in 2014. Her work looked at the role of the musical expert in the legal context and the essential roles they have played.

Olivia Wikle graduated in 2016 with a Master of Arts in Musicology. Her thesis examined Ann Radcliffe’s incorporation of music in her novel Mysteries of Udolpho, particularly considering Antonio Sacchini’s Armida and George Frederic Handel’s Israel in Egypt as influences. Wikle serves as the Head of Digital Scholarship and Initiatives at Iowa State University. She previously was the Co-Director of the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning and lead the Digital Initiatives Library at the University of Idaho.

Douglas Anthony graduated in 2015 with a PhD in Musicology. He is the founder of Walk in Two Worlds Ministries. This organization circulates new, local songs in the developing world as part of a leadership development curriculum designed for oral-preference learners. They also help ministries all around the globe engage with local culture in ways that initiate exponential transformation. Anthony is also an Adjunct Professor of Music and Ethnomusicology at Liberty Online University. His PhD dissertation research studied how tactical performances enable survival and religious piety for marginalized Christians in Odisha, India.

Emily Erken earned her PhD in Musicology in 2015. Her dissertation examined how the reception and adaptation of Eugene Onegin across literature, music, theater, and dance have served as a medium for the Russian intelligentsia to negotiate evolving concepts of morality, identity, and national values from the nineteenth century to the present. Erken currently teaches English at Purcell Marian High School. She notes that her research focused on interpretations of musical and literary works: she asks her high school students to do similar interpretive work on a smaller scale. The skills she learned in her graduate study also serve her in helping high school students undertake the International Baccalaureate program.

Alison Furlong is a Project Manager and Coordinator for the Instructional and Research IT Support Services in the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State University. She earned her PhD in Musicology in 2015. During her graduate program, she researched how sound was manifested in three particular East Berlin churches—the Samariterkirche, in Friedrichshain, the Erloserkirche, in Lichtenberg, and the Zionskirche, in Prenzlauer Berg— and the ways in which people within those churches engaged in public action through sound in the 1980s. Though Furlong works outside the field of musicology, her graduate degree has given her the ability to translate ideas between academic faculty members and technology specialists to complete digital humanities projects.

Thomas Beardslee earned his PhD in Ethnomusicology in 2014. He works as a freelance guitar instructor of multiple styles and levels and tours as a gigging musician in Belgium and the rest of Europe. Beardslee’s dissertation argued that safeguarding of traditions, with a focus in Morocco, is not the best intervention for cultural preservation and instead proposed alternatives based on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage program.

Max Bissler is an Education Specialist in neurodiagnostic technology at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and President of the Ohio Neurodiagnostic Society. He previously worked in clinical trials for epileptic patients. Bissler earned the Master of Arts in Musicology in 2014 with a thesis examining moments of spatial, historical, and identity transformations through the performance of Aboriginal community radio productions in Vancouver, BC. This research highlighted points at which space is marked as indigenous and colonial through physical movement and as well as discourse. Training in fieldwork and ethnographic methods prepared Bissler to think carefully about quality improvement and patient safety, with a broad perspective on who counts as a "stakeholder" in medical settings.

Abel Stewart is the Director of Contemporary Worship and Deacon in Residence at Northern Hills United Methodist Church in San Antonio, Texas. Stewart graduated in 2014 with an MA in Musicology. His thesis research explored how undocumented migrants within the United States use music listening in public spaces as a way of creating positions of security. He argued that music and genre-normative modes of listening form a fundamental part of the social architecture of public space, and regional Mexican music forms part of the social architecture of Mexican grocery stores as a culturally "safe" environment for migrants.

Rachel Wishkoski works as the Head of Instruction and Assessment in the University Library at Santa Clara University. She previously worked as an Associate Librarian in the Learning and Engagement Services Unit of the Utah State University Libraries. Wishkoski earned her MA in Musicology in 2014 with a thesis titled “To become something new yet familiar”: Remembering, Moving, and Re-membering in Seattle Buddhist Church’s Bon Odori Festival.” Her thesis examined the embodied ways of remembering the past and the performative process of re-membering community in the present through participatory dancing in the Bon Odori festival.

Billie Eaves is a Piano and Woodwind Instructor at Music Royale. They previously worked as a Compliance Coordinator for the Hondros College of Business and as a Ticketing Associate for the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts. Eaves graduated in 2011 with a MA in Musicology and a MM in Oboe Performance. Their thesis research examined Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies as a blend of high and low musical culture, initially combining modernist and popular elements to appeal to both artistic and bourgeois audiences.

Ștefan Firca is a Lecturer at the National University of Music in Bucharest. He graduated in 2011 with a PhD in Musicology, with a dissertation that focused on the carnivalesque aspects of late 1960s psychedelic culture. His research offered a “thick description” (Geertz) of this music as part of a larger cultural and countercultural imagination, and considered the semiotics of metaphorical representation.

Jane Harrison is Professor of Musicology at Istanbul Technical University in Turkey. She earned her PhD in Musicology in 2011 with research that focused on the music of Debussy in early twentieth-century France. Her dissertation traced the development between 1890 and 1930 of the French musical trend referred to as debussyme, a cohesive collection of techniques with aesthetic roots in contemporaneous philosophy. Harrison says the opportunity to teach a variety of different classes during her degree was helpful in preparing her for her current work, which prioritizes teaching over research.

Tsun-Hui Hung is a Chinese Language Instructor at Hawaii Pacific University and offers online erhu lessons for beginners. She earned her PhD in Ethnomusicology in 2011 with a focus on vocal and instrumental rhythm processing. Hung’s dissertation explored the cognitive processing differences between vocal and instrumental rhythms. She used behavioral experiments and brain activation measured by fMRI to investigate how humans respond to these two types of rhythms.

Soojin Kim is Assistant Professor of Musicology in the School of Music of the Korea National University of Arts. Kim graduated in 2011 with a PhD in Ethnomusicology. Her research studied music cultures and diaspora by examining the Korean genre of p’ungmul as a site of continuous and dynamic socio-political exchange between the music's Korean homeland and its host society in the United States. Kim gained valuable fieldwork and grant writing skills during her graduate program, which are crucial to her current research. She also learned how to support and assist students from diverse cultural backgrounds, enabling her to develop concrete strategies for helping international students and those with different cultural identities. She notes that her students at Korea National University of Arts are motivated and inspired by the experiences from OSU that she frequently shares with them.

Ken Archer graduated in 2009 with a PhD in Ethnomusicology. He works as a Substitute Teacher in New Jersey and has prior experience teaching at Queen’s Royal College in Trinidad and Tobago. Archer’s dissertation, “The Brooklyn Carnival: A Site for Diasporic Consolidation,” examined the ways in which sectors of the Caribbean American community in Brooklyn used performance media such as music, dance, and masking to mediate uncertainties presented by their migration to the United States. Archer argued that the Brooklyn Carnival functioned as a site in which some measure of cultural conservatism on the part of the Caribbean community could be observed.

Maureen Pritchard is a freelance Educational Consultant with Chainlink Strategies and was previously a Case Manager for North Central Mental Health Services. Her work leverages her academic expertise for the benefit of organization seeking to serve the mental health needs of culturally specific populations, especially in relation to arts-based programming. Pritchard completed her MA in Ethnomusicology in 2009. Her thesis research explored the practice of koshok, a form of lament in Kyrgyz society, which manifests in three types: a vocal lament performed by women, an instrumental performance spreading news of death, and a male singer’s vocal performance for esteemed figures. Through three years of ethnographic research in the Kyrgyz Republic, her work connected koshok to myth and emotion, showing how its performance and reception are influenced by social context and individual involvement.

Lindsay Bernhagen is a Lecturer in Community and Organizational Leadership and the Educational Sustainability Program at the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point. She also works as a freelance Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Consultant with prior experience as a Senior Learning Strategist at Torch. In 2008, Bernhagen completed her MA in Ethnomusicology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; then earned her PhD in Comparative Studies from The Ohio State University in 2013. Her master’s thesis focused on the creation and mediation of political texts in virtual spaces with a particular focus on post-9/11 anti-war music. Bernhagen credits her time at Ohio State with fostering her intellectual flexibility through her interdisciplinary experience. Her training taught her to see broad connections that are not obvious to other people.

Beth Szczepanski is a Social Studies and English Language Arts Teacher at the Cordero Education Center for Adjudicated Youth in Portland, OR, with prior teaching experience as a Visiting Professor at Lewis & Clark College and Whitman College. She graduated in 2008 with a PhD in Ethnomusicology. Szczepanski’s dissertation examined how sheng guan wind and percussion music retained elements of tradition vital to its identity as a Buddhist ritual practice, yet at the same time absorbed modern elements that allowed it to survive in the context of modern China.