Jan Blüml has been working at the Department of Musicology, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic since 2014. His main academic interest lies in the history of popular music in East Central Europe with special emphasis on music in the former Czechoslovakia. He is co-editor of the volume Popular Music in Communist and Post-Communist Europe (Peter Lang, 2019) and co-author of the monograph Popular Music Research behind the Iron Curtain: Czech Musicology in the Context of Central European Culture and Politics (Peter Lang, 2025).
Martin Cloonan is the Director of the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies (TIAS) at the University of Turku, Finland. Joint Co-ordinating Editor of Popular Music, Martin's research interests focus on the political economy of the music industries.
Alexandra Grabarchuk is a Ukrainian-born conductor and musicologist. She received her doctorate from UCLA in 2015, supported by an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship Award and a UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship. Alex currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Music at Whittier College in Southern California, where she directs the choral program and teaches music courses. She has previously served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Choral Direction & Musicology at Earlham College, and has held adjunct positions at UCLA, Chapman University, Chaffey College, Mt. San Antonio College, and the Claremont University Consortium.
Ádám Ignácz is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Musicology, Hungarian Research Network, Budapest. From 2017 to 2020, he served as the editor-in-chief of the Hungarian music publishing house Rózsavölgyi és Társa. He has been a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music since 2015, heading the Hungarian branch of the organization between 2018 and 2022. Since 2015, he has edited seven thematic volumes on Hungarian (popular) music. His 2020 monograph on the beginnings of popular music research in Hungary (Milliók zenéje. Populáris zene és zenetudomány az államszocialista Magyarországon [Music of Millions. Popular Music and Musicology in socialist Hungary]) was awarded the IASPM Book Prize in 2021. His recent book explores the academic worker's song research in the former Eastern Bloc.
Claire Levy is professor of musicology at the Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her scholarly interests lie in the fields of popular music studies and cultural theory of music. She is the author of the books Dialogichnata muzika [Dialogic Music], Etnojazat: lokalni proekzii v globalnoto selo [Ethnojazz: Local Prospects in the Global Village], Musikalnata parodia [Musical Parody], Ekrannata muzika otblizo [Screen Music Close Up], Bulgarian 20 t h Century in Arts and Culture (in co-authorship), encyclopedias entries and numerous articles and book chapters. Lately she is strongly involved as a music critic concerning current events in the field of jazz. Levy has been active in the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, where she served as Chair, General Secretary and Member-at-large of the Executive Committee in the period from 1999‒2005.
Aleš Opekar (PhD) is a researcher at the Institute of Art History (Czech Academy of Sciences), Department of Musicology. From 1999 to 2018, he worked as a program editor for jazz and popular music on Czech Radio's Vltava station. As an expert adviser and scriptwriter, he collaborated with Czech Television on various documentary series, such as Bigbít (1999) and PopStory (2016 and 2020). He is a co-author or editor of publications on the new wave in Czech rock music (Excentrici v přízemí, 1989), on Central European Popular Music (1994), on the research of popular music in Czechoslovakia (in preparation), and is the author of a monograph on the Czech rock band Matadors (2007). He lectures on popular music at Czech universities. In 1998, he founded the Popmuseum (a Museum and Archive of Popular Music in Prague).
Anna Szemere obtained her doctorate at the University of California, San Diego. She is a cultural sociologist focusing on the history of popular music in central and eastern Europe. Formerly a researcher at the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, she has taught courses in US, Canadian, and Hungarian universities. Besides journal articles and book chapters, she is the author of Bea Palya's I'll Be Your Plaything (33-1/3, Bloomsbury, 2022) and Up from the Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary (Penn State University, 2001). She has served on the Executive Committee of the International Society for the Study of Popular Music and the Advisory Boards of Popular Music and Bloomsbury Music and Sound Studies.
Peter Wicke was Professor of the Theory and History of Popular Music and Director of the Research Centre for Popular Music at the Humboldt University in Berlin from its founding in 1981 until his retirement in 2016. His teaching focus and research interests included rock music and youth culture, the history of popular music and the music industry. He studied musicology in Berlin until 1974, receiving his doctorate in 1980 with a thesis on the aesthetics of popular music, which was published in English translation as Rock Music: Culture-Aesthetics-Sociology (CUP, 1990). A founding member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and its Secretary General from 1987 to 1993, he is a long-standing member of the International Advisory Board of Popular Music and first contributed to its pages in volume 2 (1982).
