Kayleigh Bagley is a PhD student in Historical Musicology. Her current research examines the cultural exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. 

Kayleigh received an AD from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, MM in Bassoon Performance from the University of Florida, and BM in bassoon performance from the Hartt School of Music. In addition to her studies in musicology, Kayleigh regularly performs with orchestras throughout Northern Florida, and maintains a private bassoon studio.

I am a PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology specializing in blocos afro community percussion ensembles, Black resistance, and the musical movements of samba-afro and samba-reggae music in Salvador, Brazil. My dissertation, “Drumming in the Breaks of Blocos Afro: Ancestrality and Black Resistance in Salvador, Brazil,” navigates theoretical frameworks of radical Black thought between Brazil, Africa, and the United States through the contexts of blocos afro. A bloco afro is a multifunctional Carnival organization often registered as an NGO and composed of a board of directors and coordinators, musicians, percussionists, vocalists, dancers, neighborhood residents, and fans who annually celebrate an Afrocentric theme. My project explores the meanings of ancestrality (ancestralidade) and Black resistance (resistência negra) among two blocos afro (Ilê Aiyê and Olodum). Through ethnographic fieldwork funded by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA, I documented the return of concerts and community activities from May 2022 to May 2023 which amount to 100+ high quality HD and stereo recordings including Carnival and special events. I will defend my dissertation in Fall of 2024.

At UF, I completed coursework in Ethnomusicology, Latin American Studies, and the Portuguese language while teaching an Introduction to World Music and Experiencing Music for multiple semesters. Prior to UF, I worked for six years in higher administration at the University of Kansas, played guitar in multiple bands, taught secondary language and music classes, and earned his BA and MA degrees in Ethnomusicology from the University of Washington. My former research interests and fieldwork experience include researching African popular music in Ghana and Tunisia before dedicating my academic work to Afro-Bahian popular music.

Sara is an ethnomusicologist and santour player with extensive experience in performing Persian Classical music. She is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Florida. Her current work focuses on the politics of sound in the Middle East and among the Iranian diaspora in the United States. Additionally, she holds a certificate in Women's and Gender Studies and is conducting research on music and gender.

She completed her master's degree in ethnomusicology at Tehran Art University, where she completed a two-year fieldwork project, including interviews and live performance recordings, focused on hybrid genres in Iranian music. She also worked as a researcher at the Music Museum of Iran, contributing to a project aimed at digitizing gramophone records. As an active musician, Sara has performed with the UF Afropop ensemble as a percussionist and plays santour with the UF Persian ensemble.

Website: www.sarafazeli.com

I am a second-year master’s student in ethnomusicology at the school of music and my research focuses on issues of women participation in music and their contributions to cultural change in globalized contexts. I am a graduate teaching assistant and perform with the UF African Popular music ensemble as a vocalist and keyboardist. I hold a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Ghana where I studied Music with Information Studies, with piano as my major instrument. I actively perform with the UF Pazeni Sauti choir as a soprano singer because I love to connect with people from other cultures and sing songs from other African countries.

Having performed with bands such as the Dela Hayes and women of color band, and the Women in Instrumental music orchestra in Ghana, I seek to find ways to actively incorporate performance into my research work. While contributing to ethnomusicological literature on gender issues in Ghanaian music and career development, my work will be relevant to the broader literature on sustainability, continuity, and cultural change.

Gerard Spicer is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida whose research interests include Cold War cultural diplomacy, global perspectives on U.S.-mediated diplomacy, American orchestras, and digital humanities methods.

Gerard’s dissertation research focuses on the New York Philharmonic’s 1958 Latin America Tour, a cultural diplomacy tour under the auspices of the U.S. State Department, and Brazilian perspectives on U.S. soft power in Latin America during the Cold War. Gerard previously served as adjunct professor of saxophone at the University of Florida for the 2018-2019 academic year and regularly performs with regional orchestras in Florida. Gerard holds degrees from the University of Florida and the University of Western Ontario where he studied saxophone with Jonathan Helton and Barry Usher.

Holly is an ethnomusicologist, dancer, and clarinetist from Lexington, Kentucky. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida, where she focuses her research on Latin American and Caribbean music and dance genres, particularly within multicultural and diasporic communities.

Her dissertation centers on the development of sensual bachata, a sensualized version of bachata dance that is practiced around the world in bachata dance congresses. She uses sensory and movement-based methodologies to explore how sensuality informs notions of ethnic identity and community building through music and dance practice. Holly completed her Master’s in Musicology at the University of Tennessee in August 2020.

Her thesis on bachata music and dance examines how aspects of gender, embodiment, and code switching challenge and perpetuate binary gender roles in bachata dance communities at selected sites in the southeastern United States. An active musician, Holly also completed her Master’s in Clarinet Performance at UTK in 2019. Her performance activities and her ethnomusicological interests continue to shape and enrich one another.

Andrew Vogel is a saxophonist, educator, and researcher from St. Louis, Missouri. He is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology with a cognate in
Anthropology at the University of Florida. His dissertation focuses on the circulation of ska in Mexico and southern California, cultural ownership, and identity. Other areas of interest include jazz studies, popular music studies, and the anthropology of race.

He received his Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies, Music Technology from Webster University, and his Master of Arts in Jazz History and Research from Rutgers University where Andrew studied under Dr. Henry Martin and Dr. Lewis Porter. His Master’s thesis is titled, Angel Song: The Suite Life and Music of Kenny Wheeler.

Before coming to the University of Florida, Andrew taught courses in jazz history, popular music, and fundamentals of music at Rutgers University and Webster University. From 2015-2020, he worked with the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University contributing to J-DISC, the Center’s online jazz discography, and Dig That Lick: Analysing large-scale data for melodic patterns in jazz performances.
 

Website: www.andrew-vogel.com

Leo Walker is a PhD student in historical musicology focusing on the production histories of Benjamin Britten’s vocal works.

Leo is a musicologist, performing artist, and dramaturg who seeks to define the intersections between living, active performance, and curated reception histories. His current research on Benjamin Britten’s vocal works investigates violence, trauma, sex, and gender on the twenty-first-century stage. Leo often combines archival material, performer/audience testimonials, and public media to offer dynamic, sensitive approaches to contemporary theater design. Supported by the Center for European Studies, he has presented his work nationally and internationally, including chapter meetings of the American Musicological Society (AMS), UConn Graduate Music Conference, UNT’s GAMuT Graduate Student Conference, as well as the Society for Musicology of Ireland (SMI). Leo currently serves as the Student Representative to AMS-Southern, Vice President of UF’s Student Society for Musicology, and teaching assistant for undergraduate music and dance history surveys. He holds graduate and undergraduate degrees in historical musicology and voice/dance performance(s) from Western Michigan University.

Abigail Lindo is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology whose dissertation, "Azorean Acoustemologies: Gendered Postcolonial Musicking and Sonic Eco-Cosmopolitanism in Ponta Delgada," focuses on ecotourism, the postcolonial imagination, gendered behaviors in music creation, and intersectional awareness in sonic engagement in the Azores - where she resided during the 2022-23 academic year on a Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship. Within this work, Lindo interpolates the geographically and culturally specific ideas from works of Black feminist scholars into her ethnographic work to aid in a sociocultural critique of postcolonial sonic realities on the island. She recognizes the shifting definition of cultural identity in the Azores in response to globalization and contextualizes how understanding the colonial past transforms the geographical sounding and silence into sexualized and racialized realities. For more information about her research, click here.

Lindo is a Jamaican-born, vocalist, educator, creative, and social scientist whose academic interests include Black sonic expression and identity, Jamaican popular music and gender dynamics, the politics of community music-making, and Portuguese popular music consumption and festival culture in the Azores. She is a P.E.O. Scholar, SEC Emerging Scholar, and recent inductee of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society at Yale. Her work has been presented nationally and internationally, supported by funding from the University of Florida, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Fulbright Commission in Portugal. She has published work on Black music and visual culture, ethnographic fieldwork, and has multiple forthcoming publications relating to community music-making and womanist literature connected to the work of Black female vocalists. She is a former K-12 teacher and classically trained mezzo-soprano who is actively incorporating performance into her current dissertation work, among other creative approaches.

Website: abigaillindo.com

Jeana Melilli is a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology at the University of Florida. Areas of study include Eighteenth-Century performance practice, gender studies, labor history and practice, and the confluence of theory and praxis. Her dissertation, “Unfootnoting Women: The Sociability of the Eighteenth Century Trio and Accompanied Sonatas,” reveals the genre’s reliance on the musical ability and patronage of women musicians and composers in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, especially Naples and Noto, Sicily.

Jeana has presented her research on the trio sonatas of François Couperin, Pietro Locatelli, and J. S. Bach at national and international conferences. She co-created Lux Solaris, an Eighteenth-Century music ensemble at the University of Florida. For the 2021-2022 academic year, she was a FLAS fellow in Italian at UF. The UF Center for European Studies and Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere each awarded her travel grants to finish her dissertation in Italy for the summer of 2023.

Jeana received her BM in Flute Performance from The Catholic University of America and an MM in Flute Performance from Northwestern University. As an orchestral flutist, Jeana is Principal Flute of the Savannah Philharmonic and Third Flute/Piccolo of the Greenville Symphony Orchestra Her chamber groups include the historical performance ensembles Savannah Baroque and the Vista Ensemble in Columbia, SC, as well as more modern chamber works with The Blue Heron Chamber Ensemble in Savannah, GA.

My work explores musical commodities at the intersection of market and non-market exchange.

I am particularly interested in the articulation of production and consumption, where sound and sonic registers are my guide. With fieldwork in factories, warehouses, and call centers, my research has focused on the fetishization of musical products. At the University of Florida, I am the instructor of the course Popular Music in America and the founding director of the Popular Music Ensemble—an ensemble open to all University of Florida students coming from any musical background. I am also a member of the Alachua Guitar Ensemble. I hold an MM in guitar performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a BM from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. jasonmullen@ufl.edu