Amy Coddington is Assistant Professor of Music at Amherst College where she teaches classes on American popular music. She is working on a book titled How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Rap, Race, and Commercial Radio, which explores how rap broke into a mainstream audience in the 1980s and 1990s through programming on commercial radio stations. She recently published a chapter on related matters in The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Studies (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Max Erwin is a postdoctoral fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute, having completed his PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. His research is primarily focused on musical avant-gardes and their institutional networks. He is currently completing a monograph on the advent of ‘total’ serialism at Darmstadt while beginning a new research project exploring the pedagogical use of New Music in the Third Reich. His writing appears in Tempo, Perspectives of New Music, Music & Literature, Revue belge de Musicologie, Nuove Musiche, and Cacophony.
Andrew Flory is Associate Professor of Music at Carleton College. He has published widely on rock and R&B topics and is the author of I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B (Michigan, 2017). He works as a consultant for Universal Music Enterprises, and has co-produced many Motown-oriented reissues. He is currently writing a book about Marvin Gaye in the 1960s.
Jack Hamilton is Associate Professor of American Studies and Media Studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2016). He is also the pop critic for Slate magazine and his writing has appeared in print and online for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, Transition, and many other publications. He is currently at work on a book about popular music and technology since the 1960s.
David Ireland is an Associate Professor in Film Music Studies and Music Psychology at the School of Music at the University of Leeds, UK. His research addresses the role of music in the perception of meaning in, and emotional response to, film. David is particularly interested in incongruent film music, which displays a lack of shared properties with concurrent filmic images and narrative, and the ways in which approaches from music psychology and film music studies can help to understand such moments. He is the author of Identifying and Interpreting Incongruent Film Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and has published on the incongruent soundtrack in The Soundtrack and Music and the Moving Image journals.
Loren Kajikawa is Associate Professor of Music at The George Washington University's Corcoran School of the Arts and Design where he teaches courses in music history and ethnomusicology. His research focuses on the intersection of music, race, and politics in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His book Sounding Race in Rap Songs (University of California, 2015) analyses the role that hip-hop beats play in the construction of racial identity. Kajikawa has also served as editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music and is currently series coeditor for Tracking Pop, University of Michigan Press's popular music book series.
Andrew Mall is Assistant Professor of Music at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. He teaches courses in ethnomusicology, music industry, and popular music studies. He is the author of God Rock, Inc.: The Business of Niche Music (University of California Press, 2020), co-editor of Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives (Routledge, 2021), and book review co-editor of the journal Ethnomusicology. His writing has appeared in American Music, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, Popular Music, and several edited volumes, among others.
James McNally is a lecturer in the departments of Music and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research investigates popular and experimental music in Brazil, with focuses on collaboration, cultural politics, and the music of the African diaspora.
Francesca T. Royster is Professor of English at DePaul University. She is author of Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), and Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003). She has written on Shakespeare, Black Lesbian Country music fans, Prince, and other topics. She is currently at work on a memoir, Love: A Journey of Black Queer Motherhood (under contract from Abrams Books) and Black Edens: Country Music's Black Queer Frequencies (under contract at University of Texas Press).
Christina Taylor Gibson is a project archivist at the Special Collections in Performing Arts, University of Maryland, College Park. Her scholarship is about musical modernism in the Americas during the first half of the twentieth century, with a particular interest in identity creation, reception, and cultural exchange – particularly between the United States and Mexico. Recent publications include ‘Chávez, Modern Music, and the New York Scene’ in Carlos Chávez and his World, ed. Leonora Saavedra (Princeton University Press, 2015), ‘Carrillo and Sonido Trece in New York’ in ‘Redes, circuitos y círculos artísticos e intelectuales México-USA/ USA-México’, a special issue of La Habana Elegante (spring 2014), ‘Manuel M. Ponce's canciones in New York: Mexican Musical Identity and the Mexico Vogue’, in Music, Longing, and Belonging, ed. Magdalena Waligórska (Cambridge Scholars, 2013), and “The Reception of Carlos Chávez's Horsepower: A Pan-American Communication Failure’, American Music (summer 2012).
Brian F. Wright is Assistant Professor of Music History at the University of North Texas. He holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from Case Western Reserve University and is a former research assistant for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library and Archive. His current book project, The Bastard Instrument: A Cultural History of the Electric Bass, details the early history of the electric bass in jazz, rock, country, and R&B, exploring issues such as social stigma, amateur music-making, race, and popular music historiography.
