Editorial Team

Editorial Team

General Editors

Harris M. Berger

Harris M. Berger is Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology, Professor of Ethnomusicology and Folklore, and Director of the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His research focuses on the theoretical foundations of ethnomusicology and folklore studies, phenomenological approaches to expressive culture, and heavy metal music. His books include Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience, Global Pop, Local Language (Harris M. Berger and Micheal T. Carrol, eds.), Identity and Everyday Life: Essays in the Study of Folklore, Music, and Popular Culture (Harris M. Berger and Giovanna P. Del Negro), Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture, and Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World (Jeremy Wallach, Harris M. Berger, and Paul D. Greene, eds.). He has served as editor Journal of American Folklore, series editor of Wesleyan University Press’s Music/Culture book series, president of the US Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and president of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Jocelyne Guilbault

Jocelyne Guilbault is Distinguished Professor of Ethnomusicology and Popular Music in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1980, she has done extensive fieldwork in the French Creole- and English-speaking islands of the Caribbean on both traditional and popular music. Informed by a postcolonial perspective, she published several articles on issues of representation, aesthetics, West Indian music industries, multiculturalism, world music, music and militarization, and the politics of musical bonding. She is the author of Zouk: World Music in the West Indies (1993), a study that maps the complex musical network among the French-Creole speaking islands, and the vexed relations that are articulated through music between the West Indian French Departments and the Metropole, France. Her book, Governing Sound: the Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics (2007), explores the ways the calypso music scene became audibly entangled with projects of governing, audience demands, and market incentives. In Roy Cape: A Lifetime on the Calypso and Soca Bandstand (2014), an experiment in dialogic co-authorship with a reputed Trinidadian musician, she engages the audible entanglements of circulation, reputation and sound. She recently coedited a volume titled The Political Economy of Music and Sound: Case Studies in the Caribbean Tourism Industry. Dr. Guilbault has been on several editorial boards and served as a board member of the Canadian Music Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Caribbean Studies Association, and the Board of Governors of the University of California Humanities.

Editorial Board

Samuel Araujo

Samuel Araujo holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1992) and is a Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Having served on the Executive Board of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) from 1999 through 2001, when he acted as Chair of the Local Arrangements Committee for the 37th ICTM World Congress, he is currently serving as First Vice-President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and on the editorial boards of Latin American Music Review, the Malayan Journal of Music, and Música y Investigación (Argentina). He has also been president of the Brazilian Association for Ethnomusicology (2006–2008) and Music Coordinator for Rio de Janeiro’s Secretary of Culture. His research interests include music and power relations, dialogical music ethnography, applied ethnomusicology, and the history of world ethnomusicologies. Having published extensively in Brazil and abroad, his English-language publications include an article co-authored with residents of a Brazilian urban community that appeared in the 50th anniversary issue of the journal Ethnomusicology (“Conflict and Violence as Theoretical Tools in Present-Day Ethnomusicology”) and a chapter in Music in Conflict (University of Illinois Press, 2010), which was co-edited by John Morgan O’Connell and Salwa El-Shawan Castelo Branco. His latest publication, the book Samba, Sambistas e Sociedade, Um Ensaio Etnomusicólogico, was released in 2021 by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Press.

Christopher Ballantine

Christopher Ballantine is Emeritus Professor of Music and a Lifetime Fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. His academic career has been built around a fundamental interest in the role that music can play in the struggle for a better, more egalitarian society, and his research has broached a range of theoretical and disciplinary fields, including the sociology of music, musical meaning, and the philosophy of music. Working as a radical musicologist, he has written extensively about issues related to endogenous music in Africa and varieties of 20th- and 21st-century popular, Western-classical, and operatic music. His philosophically grounded writings are widely published internationally; they explore the meanings and social implications of music and the forces that shape it. In addition to a large number of peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, his books include Music and its Social Meanings; the award-winning Marabi Nights: Jazz, “Race,” and Society in Early Apartheid South Africa; Twentieth Century Symphony; and the co-authored Living Together, Living Apart? Social Cohesion in a Future South Africa. His most recent publications include chapters in Sound and Imagination and The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies, and “Against Populism: Music, Classification, Genre” in the journal Twentieth-Century Music. A chapter in The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies is in press.

Alessandro Bertinetto

Alessandro Bertinetto is Full Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Turin, where he teaches in the philosophy of music. His previous roles include Researcher in Aesthetics at the University of Udine, Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Turin, and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. He has served as a visiting scholar at a number of universities, including Complutense University of Madrid, Autonomous University of Madrid, University of Murcia, University of Toulouse, Kanazawa University, University of Luxembourg, Freie Universität Berlin, University of Valencia, and Federal University of Belo Horizonte. His research interests encompass German idealism, aesthetics, hermeneutics, philosophy of music, creativity, and improvisation. Recent publications from Bertinetto include Il pensiero dei suoni (Burno Mondadori, 2012; French translation, La pensée des sons. Introduction à la philosophie de la musique, Delatour, 2017), Eseguire l’inatteso. Ontologia musicale e improvvisazione (il Glifo, 2016), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts (edited with Marcello Ruta, Routledge 2021), and Estetica dell’improvvisazione (il Mulino 2021; English translation Aesthetics of Improvisation, Fink/Brill, 2022). Currently, his research is focused on the role of habits in aesthetic experiences and artistic practices, including music and the performing arts. From 2012 to 2018, he was a member of the Executive Committee of the European Society for Aesthetics. He is currently the Coordinator of ART-Aesthetics Research Torino (www.art.unito.it), a permanent seminar he founded in 2018.

Marie Buscatto

Marie Buscatto is Full Professor of Sociology at Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne University (France). She is a sociologist of arts, gender, and work, and her early research examined the processes limiting women’s access to the world of jazz. Her current research focuses on social inequalities affecting the trajectories of artists in developed countries. She also studies subjective and objective ambivalences affecting artistic practices, careers, and professions, as well as the epistemological status of qualitative methods. In the past twenty years, Buscatto has published more than 130 papers, special issues, articles, or books. More information on her work can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marie_Buscatto. Her latest articles in English include “Getting Old in Art: Revisiting the Trajectories of ‘Modest’ Artists,” which appeared in the journal Recherches sociologiques et anthropologiques, and “Feminisations of Artistic Work: Legal Measures and Female Artists’ Resources Do Matter,” which appeared in Todas as Artes. Her recent English-language book chapters include “Beyond Frontiers: From Japanese Traditional Koto to Transnational Improvised Music” (in Musique, Mondialisation et Sociétés, Presses Universitaires de Rouen, 2020), “Doing Ethnography: Ways and Reasons” (The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection, Sage Publications, 2018), and “Trying to Get In, Getting In, Staying In: The Three Challenges for Women Jazz Musicians” (in Bourdieu in Question: New Directions in French Sociology of Art, Brill Editions, 2018).

Adrian Curtin

Adrian Curtin is Associate Professor in the Department of Communications, Drama, and Film at the University of Exeter. He has a PhD in interdisciplinary theatre studies from Northwestern University, where he was a Presidential Fellow. He is the author of Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (Palgrave, 2014) and Death in Modern Theatre: Stages of Mortality (Manchester University Press, 2019) and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism in Contemporary Theatre (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). His research has focused on theatrical modernism from the late nineteenth century onward, theatre sound and aurality, theatrical exploration of mortality, and the theatrical representation of Western classical music. He co-founded the Sound, Voice, and Music working group of the Theatre and Performance Research Association. He was the principal investigator of a research network entitled “Representing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century,” which was funded by the Arts, Humanities and Research Council (UK) and operated from 2019 to 2021. This network explored contemporary artistic and media representation of classical music, as well as demographic representation in the classical music industry. He later co-edited a special collection of the Open Library of Humanities on this topic. In 2022, he was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to work on a research project and a program of public engagement about “orchestral theatre,” focusing on interdisciplinary performance experimentation by contemporary British ensembles. He is a classically trained cellist and has worked as an actor, musician, and theatre-maker.

Philip Ewell

Philip Ewell is Professor of Music Theory at Hunter College of the City University of New York. His research specialties include race studies in music theory, Russian music theory, Russian opera, modal theory and history, twentieth-century music theory, and hiphop and popular music. As a public music theorist, he has appeared in Adam Neely’s YouTube channel, the BBC, the CBC, The Daily Beast, Die Zeit, The Economist, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Our Body Politic, The Times (London), and WQXR’s Aria Code, among other outlets. His recent monograph, On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone, takes an explicitly antiracist and antisexist stance toward music theory and academic music, while offering thoughts for the future. He is currently coauthoring a new undergraduate music theory textbook, The Engaged Musician: Theory and Analysis for the Twenty-First Century, for W.W. Norton, which will be a modernized and inclusive textbook based on recent developments in music theory pedagogy. He is also under contract at Routledge for the edited collection American Antiblackness, which he is co-editing with sociologist Joe Feagin. Ewell is the series editor for the Oxford University Press book series Theorizing African American Music, which launched in fall 2022.

Ruth Herbert

Dr Ruth Herbert is Senior Lecturer in Music Psychology and Music Performance and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Arts at the University of Kent. Much of her work has focused on the phenomenology of musical experience in everyday life. She has cross-disciplinary research interests in the fields of music and consciousness, trance and ASC, music health and wellbeing, music education, performance psychology, and evolutionary psychology. Her published volumes include Everyday Music Listening: Absorption, Dissociation and Trancing (Routledge, [2011] 2016), Music and Consciousness 2: Worlds, Practices, Modalities (co-edited with Eric Clarke and David Clarke; Oxford University Press, 2019), and Beyond Autistic Stereotypes: Gender, Identity & Experience (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025). Herbert’s journal articles and chapters have centred on a range of topics, including musical daydreaming, trancing, and trait/state understandings of absorption. Herbert has contributed to UK BBC Radio 4 & 5 features on music and consciousness, music and spiritual wellbeing, and music, food, and multisensory experience. She is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Sonic Studies, book reviews editor and an associate editor for Musicae Scientiae, and a trustee for the Beyond Divisions Education Trust and the National Youth Jazz Collective. She is currently working on a research project that applies transdisciplinary understanding to arts-based mental health research.

Maureen Mahon

Maureen Mahon is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include African American music and culture and the construction and performance of race, gender, and sexuality in popular music. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of Music at New York University and the author of Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural Politics of Race (Duke University Press, 2004). Her book Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll (Duke University Press, 2020) was awarded the Otto Kinkeldey Award by the American Musicological Society and the Alan Merriam Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her articles on African American music have appeared in the Annual Review of Anthropology,Ethnomusicology,Journal of the American Musicological Society,Journal of Popular Music Studies,Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, The Guardian,EbonyJet.com,andOxford American and on the websites ofNational Public Radio and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She has held fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. Mahon was the Chief Academic Advisor for “Soundtrack of America,” the 2019 concert series commission by filmmaker Steve McQueen that opened the inaugural season of The Shed in New York City.

James G. Mansell

James G. Mansell is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural, Media, and Visual Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. He specializes in historical cultures of hearing and listening and in heritage practices relating to the sounding past. He is the author of The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (University of Illinois Press, 2017) and co-editor of Negotiating Noise Across Spaces, Places and Disciplines (Lund University, 2021). He has published articles and book chapters on historical methodology in sound studies, including chapters in The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (2018) and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies (2020). His collaborative work with museums on the question of how to collect and exhibit historical music and audio technologies includes the projects “Sonic Futures: Collecting, Curating and Engaging with Sound at the National Science and Media Museum” (2020–2021) and “Music, Noise and Silence: Building Engagement in the Culture of Science and Music” (2015), the latter a collaboration with the Science Museum, London. His credits as a curator include the exhibitions “Enchanted Modernities: Mysticism, Landscape, and the American West” (Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, 2014), which focused on the links between art, music, and alternative spiritualities in the United States, and “Pioneering Spirit: Maud MacCarthy – Music, Mysticism and Modernity” (Borthwick Institute for Archives, 2014), which dealt with the life and work of Irish violinist, mystic, and Indian music expert, Maud MacCarthy.

Ellen Waterman

Ellen Waterman holds the Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada and is a Professor in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University. Her interdisciplinary research in music and sound studies engages with improvisation, performance ecologies, listening, and community-engaged research-creation methodologies. Her early work examined the environmental music dramas of R. Murray Schafer. In the 2000s, she conducted Sounds Provocative a cross-Canada comparative research project on experimental music performance. Waterman is also active as a flutist/vocalist specializing in creative improvisation, a practice that informs her research-creation. Her instructional score Bodily Listening in Place (2022), commissioned by New Adventures in Sound Art, explores an expanded concept of listening across different sensory modalities. Waterman’s books include three edited collections: Sonic Geography Imagined and Remembered, The Art of Immersive Soundscapes (with Pauline Minevich and James Harley), and Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity (with Gillian Siddall). She has been a core member of the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation since its inception and was a founding co-editor of the peer reviewed journal Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation. She is a member of the editorial collective for Improvising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (Music and Social Justice Series, U Michigan Press 2023).  In 2021, Waterman founded the Research Centre for Music, Sound, and Society in Canada, dedicated to exploring the complex and diverse roles that music and sonic arts play in shaping Canadian society.

Lee Watkins

Lee Watkins is the Director of the International Library of African Music at Rhodes University in South Africa. He is the editor of African Music, a journal which was established in 1954. As editor, Watkins has a pivotal role in the development of young African music scholars and is particularly interested in mentoring those from non-English language backgrounds. He also teaches ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at Rhodes University. His research interests are diverse and coincide with his teaching interests, which are mostly concerned with making ethnomusicology appropriate to a rural context, where poverty and social dysfunction are pervasive. Research on the jazz heritage of the Eastern Cape Province, where Rhodes University is based, and participatory heritage research in a group of rural villages near Rhodes University are among his key recent projects. He also specializes in hip-hop and rap studies in South Africa, with several publications on the topic and a book in progress. He has written on the subjects of migrant Filipino musicians in Hong Kong, where he conducted his doctoral research, and decolonizing the colonial music repository. He is excited to serve on the editorial board of Music Research Annual.