Education: PhD, Musicology, University of Rochester (Eastman School of Music), 2009
MA, Musicology, University of Rochester (Eastman School of Music), 2000
BA, Music (Voice), University of Charleston (WV), 1998

Department: Fine and Performing Arts

Office: Chapel

CONTACT ME FOR…

• Anything music-related

RESEARCH INTERESTS

As a specialist primarily in American music, broadly defined, my research and teaching focuses on the role that music – folk, popular, and classical – plays in the formation of national identity in Latin America and the United States, as well as on binational and transnational cultural processes throughout the region.  My dissertation explored the musical nationalisms (art and popular) of Mexico and the United States in the context of the binational relationship.

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY

I have presented my research at national and international conferences, including those held by the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the International Musicological Society and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. An article on a nineteenth-century Mexican album of piano music I discovered at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2017 will be included in a collection of essays to be published by the Universidad Internacional de Andalucía. Currently I am preparing a scholarly monograph tentatively entitled Musical Encounters: Music, Politics, and Identity in the United States-Mexico Borderlands, which attempts, for the first time in scholarly literature, a comprehensive look at the role of music in the U.S.-Mexico encounter at the borderlands. In 2017 I worked on this monograph at an interdisciplinary, NEH-funded Summer Institute at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

As a singer, I had my European debut in August 2018 as Gertrude in Hänsel und Gretel at the Trentino Music Festival in Fiera di Primiero, Italy. I appeared in May 2017 on tour with OperaMaya in Mexico in scenes from Turandot (Liu), Die Zauberflöte (First Lady), and Die Entführung aus dem Serail (Constanze). In July 2017 I returned to Chicago Summer Opera in scenes from Little Women (Amy) and The Turn of the Screw (Flora).

Previous full roles include Second Lady in Die Zauberflöte with ViVaCe Vancouver Summer Opera Workshop, Suor Maria in Giordano’s Mese mariano with Miami Music Festival, Omega in Gluck’s Le Cadi Dupé with New York Lyric Opera Theater, Mrs. Gobineau in Menotti’s The Medium and the Novice in Puccini’s Suor Angelica with Chicago Summer Opera. Partial roles include Maria in West Side Story, Ortlinde in Die Walküre (Lincoln Center), Leonora in Il Trovatore, Marianne in Tartuffe, Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, Valencienne in The Merry Widow, and Malika in Lakmé.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

I am a member of Baroque Artists of Champaign-Urbana.