Christina D. Abreu is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Latino and Latin American Studies at Northern Illinois University. Her research focuses on the role of race, nationalism, and migration in the Cuban and Spanish Caribbean diasporic communities of the United States with a particular emphasis on popular culture. She is the author of Rhythms of Race: Cuban Musicians and the Making of Latino New York City and Miami, 1940-1960 (UNC Press, 2015) and is currently working on a second book, under contract with the University of Illinois Press, looking at race and sport in Cuba and U.S.-Cuba relations in the 1970s and 1980s using the story of Teófilo Stevenson, an Afro-Cuban heavyweight boxer who won three gold medals in the 1972, 1976, and 1980 Olympic Games.
Michael Bourdaghs is Robert S. Ingersoll Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago. He previously taught at UCLA and received his Ph.D. in Asian Literature from Cornell University. A specialist in modern Japanese literature and culture, he is the author of The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Tōson and Japanese Nationalism (2003) and Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop (2012; Japanese translation 2012). He is also a prolific translator, most recently of Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange (2014). He is the recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and numerous other fellowships and awards.
Leigh H. Edwards is Professor of English at Florida State University. She is the author of the books Dolly Parton, Gender, and Country Music (Indiana University Press, 2018, winner of the Foreword Book of the Year Award), Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Indiana University Press, 2009), and The Triumph of Reality TV: The Revolution in American Television (Praeger, 2013). A scholar of American literature and popular culture from the nineteenth century to the present, she focuses on intersections of gender and race in popular music, television, and new media. Her work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, Journal of Popular Television, Film & History, Narrative, FLOW, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Global Media Journal, Journal of American Studies, and Southern Cultures. She is on the advisory board of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies, and on the editorial boards of Journal of Popular Television and The Popular Culture Studies Journal.
Nancy Guy is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California at San Diego. Her interests include the musics of Taiwan and China, varieties of opera (including European and Chinese forms), music and state politics, and the ecocritical study of music. She is the author of Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan (University of Illinois Press, 2005), which won the ASCAP Béla Bartók Award for Excellence in Ethnomusicology and was named an “Outstanding Academic Title for 2006” by Choice, and The Magic of Beverly Sills (University of Illinois Press, 2015).
John Lie is C.K. Cho Professor of Sociology and teaches social theory at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent publications include K-pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea (University of California Press, 2015), and The Dream of East Asia: The Rise of China, Nationalism, Popular Memory, and Regional Dynamics in Northeast Asia (Association for Asian Studies, 2018).
Treva Lindsey is Associate Professor and Chair of Graduate Studies of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University. Her research and teaching interests include African American women’s history, black popular and expressive culture, black feminism(s), hip hop studies, critical race and gender theory, and sexual politics. Her first book Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington D.C is a Choice 2017 “Outstanding Academic Title.” She has published in The Journal of Pan-African Studies, Souls, African and Black Diaspora, the Journal of African American Studies, African American Review, The Journal of African American History, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Urban Education, The Black Scholar, Feminist Studies, and Signs. She is a 2020-2021 ALCS/Mellon Scholars and Society Fellow. She was the inaugural Equity for Women and Girls of Color Fellow at Harvard University (2016-2017). She was also a 2017-2018 Du Bois Non-Residential Fellow at Harvard University. She received the 2018-2019 Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Diversity Enhancement Faculty Award. She is currently working on her next book projects tentatively and respectively titled, Hear The Screams: Black Women, Violence, and The Struggle for Justice and 90s Kinda Girl: A Celebration of Braids, Bamboo Earrings, and Black Girl Everything. She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Emory University, the National Women’s Studies Association, the Coca Cola Critical Difference for Women Grant, the Center for Arts and Humanities at the University of Missouri and the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. She writes for and contributes to outlets such as Al Jazeera, BET, Complex, Vox, The Root, Huffington Post, Popsugar, Billboard, Teen Vogue, Grazia UK, The Grio, The Washington Post, Women’s Media Center, Zora, and Cosmopolitan.
Katherine Meizel is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University. Her book Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol (Indiana University Press) was published in 2011, and Multivocality: Singing on the Borders of Identity (Oxford University Press) in January 2020. Her work has appeared on Slate.com, NPR.org, NewRepublic.com, and TheConversation.com, and she also recently co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies (2019).
Carol Muller is Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published widely on South African Music at home and abroad; on women and religious practices (four books plus articles). She is currently writing a book on the Music of Contemporary Africa for Routledge; working on a project, Faith of Our Fathers, with Tshepo Masango on the unlikely friendship of two Presbyterian ministers under apartheid; is at the start of a large South African jazz podcasting project; and is working on a Master’s in Public Health to address issues of childhood trauma and the arts. She is a faculty fellow in one of Penn’s College Houses, and deeply engaged in online and community partnership pedagogy. Muller is a seasoned gumboot dancer.
Natalie Sarrazin holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Master’s degree in Music Education from Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Sarrazin’s area of teaching and scholarship includes ethnomusicology, Indian popular music, and music education. Dr. Sarrazin’s recent publications include Popular Music in Contemporary India (2019), published as part of Routledge’s Focus on World Music series.
Anthony Seeger is Distinguished Professor of Ethnomusicology, Emeritus, at the University of California, Los Angeles and Director and Curator Emeritus of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. He holds a BA from Harvard University and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He is the author of three books on the Suyá/Kĩsêdjê Indians in Brazil, co-editor of three books, and author of over 120 articles and book chapters on ethnomusicology, anthropology, audiovisual archives, applied ethnomusicology, intellectual property, and American vernacular music. He served as President of the Society for Ethnomusicology and President and later Secretary General of the International Council for Traditional Music. He is a nephew of Pete Seeger.
Carol Silverman is Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Folklore at the University of Oregon. She has done research with Roma for over 30 years in the Balkans, Western Europe, and the US. Her work explores the intersection of politics, music, human rights, gender, and state policy with a focus on issues of representation. She is also a professional vocalist and teacher of Balkan music, and works with the NGO Voice of Roma. Her book Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2012, winner of the Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology) explores how Romani music is both an exotic commodity in the world music market and a trope of multiculturalism in cosmopolitan contexts. Her recent research, supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, is on the globalization of “Gypsy” music.
Andrew Simon is a social historian of the modern Middle East, with a particular interest in media technologies, popular culture, and the study of sound. He was a fellow at the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) in Egypt during the 2011 mass uprising and received his Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University in 2017. Currently, he is serving as a lecturer and research associate in Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. Andrew’s interdisciplinary research has received generous support from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), and has been the subject of numerous presentations in and outside of the Arab world. His first book project, Sounding History: Cassettes, Culture, and Everyday Life in Modern Egypt (presently under review), explores what the vibrant biography of one technology may teach us about a society’s dynamic past. An article based on a chapter from this manuscript was recently published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES, May 2019).