Tyler Bickford is professor of children's literature and childhood studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Trained as an ethnomusicologist, his research focuses on children's media, especially popular music and digital technology, using ethnographic and cultural studies methods. He is the author of Tween Pop: Children's Music and Public Culture (Duke University Press, 2020) and Schooling New Media: Music, Language, and Technology in Children's Culture (Oxford University Press, 2017).
Kai Arne Hansen is Professor of Music in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences (INN). His research interests include popular music and identity, gender and sexuality, contemporary media, narrativity, audiovisual aesthetics, and the musical cultures of children. He is the author of Pop Masculinities: The Politics of Gender in Twenty-First Century Popular Music (Oxford University Press, 2022), which directs attention to the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize the performance and reception of gender identity in pop music contexts. His current work focuses in part on the diverse significances and implications of children's musical environmentalism and social activism. Hansen co-chairs the research group Music Education and Cultural Studies (INN) and is an elected board member of The Association for Gender Research in Norway.
Shuhei Hosokawa is Director of the Research Institute of Japanese Traditional Music, Kyoto City University of Arts. He has co-edited Karaoke Around the World: Global Technology, Local Singing (Routledge 1998) with Toru Mitsui and is the author of Sentiment, Language, and the Arts: The Japanese-Brazilian Heritage (2022). His English publications range from ‘The Walkman Effect’ (1984) to ‘Tōkyō Ondo in Historical Perspective’ (2022), including studies of Hawaiian Music in Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s (1994), Haruomi Hosono and Japanese Self-Orientalism (1999), Orquesta de la Luz and the Globalization of Popular Music (1999), Humanizing Celebrity in Japanese Music Variety Shows, 1960s-1990s (2001, w/Carolyn Stevens), the Sound Design of Godzilla (2004), Theatrical Functions of Ballyhoo, Orchestras, and Kabuki Ensembles (2014), and The Noise Abatement Movement in Industrializing Japan, 1923-1937 (2020).
Samuel Robles is Staff Musicologist at the Center for Historical, Anthropological and Cultural Research (CIHAC AIP), Panama and Research Associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. His main area of research is Panamanian music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on violinists and violin repertoire, and accordion conjunto music. He is currently working on a research project on the drumming traditions of the Azuero peninsula through a SENACYT (Panama) grant. He holds degrees from the University of Cincinnati, the Universiy of Chicago and North-West University and is a Fulbright alumnus.
Tom Wagner is a Teaching Fellow in Music Performance and Digital Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. His current research focuses on the negotiation of ethics and value(s) in emerging virtual music ecologies. His previous work focused on interplay between music, marketing, meaning, and transcendent experiences in consumer culture. His monograph Music, Branding, and Consumer Culture in Church, was published in 2019 with Routledge.
Yusuke Wajima is Professor of Musicology at Osaka University in Japan. He has published on the history of Japanese popular music in vernacular contexts, authoring Creating Enka: The ‘Soul of Japan’ in the Postwar Era (2010, English translation 2018), winner of the 2011 IASPM Book Prize, which elucidated the discursive formation of the allegedly traditional genre of enka. His second book in Japanese, Dance Music in the Showa (1926-1989) Period (2015), discussed music and dance in modern Japan, focusing on the reception of Latin dance musics. His recent English publication is a chapter titled ‘Japanese Disco as Pseudo-International Music’ in Global Dance Cultures in the 1970s and 1980s (Palgrave 2022).
