I am a scholar of transnational musical collaboration and community in the 20th and 21st centuries. My primary research project investigates Cold War Modernism and how musicians shaped this global conflict through collaborations that crossed borders. In my dissertation, I do so through a study of Spanish musicians in the United States during the 1950s, focusing on the guitarist Andrés Segovia, the composer Joaquín Rodrigo, and their transformation of a personal project into cultural diplomacy on behalf of Spain.
Through transatlantic archival records, I demonstrate that these artists utilized a network of friends to bring their music to America and, once there, lay cultural groundwork that supported a rapprochement between the United States and Spain. My secondary area concerns musical memorials and their role in fostering communal reckoning with tragedy, which I first explored in a 2024 special issue of Holocaust Studies on ecocriticism. Blending ethnography and historiography, I compared the role of animals in a 1997 fraudulent Holocaust memoir and its 2005 operatic adaptation by the Jewish composer Francesco Lotoro, arguing that Lotoro used non-humans to teach listeners in his local community about the dehumanization of genocide.
I am currently a PhD candidate in musicology at Northwestern University, where I have taught courses on subjects ranging from music and sports to the global history of rock. I previously earned a BM in guitar from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MM in guitar/MA in musicology from Indiana University-Bloomington. My research has been supported by the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Northwestern/Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Program, and the Northwestern Graduate Research Grant. I have shared my work at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the Sociedad Española de Musicología, and various other conferences in the United States and Spain.