Graduate Student News | Notes from the Hill

UNC-KCL students after the 13th annual conference.

Danny Allen presented “A Struggle of Identity: Musicking in the Japanese American Incarceration Camps during World War II” at the Yale Graduate Music Symposium in February. He also presented “The Transmission and Embodiment of Shakuhachi Technique” at the UNC-KCL Conference in May. Danny was awarded the Asian American Center Research/Travel Award for Summer 2024 and the Kenan Graduate Student Activities Fund for Summer 2024. The awards will fund his research on the Japanese American Incarceration Camps and music for his master’s thesis.

Drew Borecky received a Mary Valentine and Andrew Cosman Research Fellowship at the Strong National Museum of Play to perform archival research for his dissertation on the intersection of Music and tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). He will present at a conference later this summer called Generation Analog 2024.

Melissa Camp presented “Listening to Arab Modernity: Commercial Recordings from the 1932 Cairo Congress” at AMS. She also served on the organizing committee for the 13th Annual UNC-KCL Graduate Student Music Conference, held at UNC in May.

Justin Frankeny conducted dissertation research in Miami in June and July using funds from the Society for American Music’s Cone Fellowship and the University of Miami’s Goizueta Fellowship. During the 23-24 academic year he served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music History at Baldwin Wallace University, teaching 12 credits in the fall and 12 in the spring. He also presented at the fall 2023 meeting of the Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society and participated in the UNC Online Course Development Support Program facilitated by Digital and Lifelong Learning for his UNC Summer School Course, MUSC 143: Intro to Rock. Justin has been hired to teach 3 courses in music history and music appreciation at Duquesne University this fall.

Kira Gaillard presented “The Enemy Without: Blitzstein’s Reuben Reuben, Silence, and Biopolitics” at AMS. She received an FLAS fellowship to study Arabic at the Qasid Institute in Amman, Jordan this summer. The fellowship was awarded by the Center for Middle East & Islamic Studies (CMEIS) and is funded through the US Department of Education.

ken Ge presented “Ungrading Jazz: Listening and Writing as Decolonial Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Jazz History Survey” at AMS. This year, he traveled to South Florida, is now conducting research in the UK and Denmark through the early summer, and will continue research in the Philippines going into the fall. This spring he was the recipient of the Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship, and presented research at the International Tourism & Leisure Studies Conference in Liverpool, as well as the Royster Global ’24 Conference in London in June.

Joshua Harton was elected student representative for the AMS-SE chapter alongside Destiny Meadows.

Eden Jones taught Intro to Rock during the 2024 summer at Orange Correctional Center as part of UNC’s correctional education program.

Stella Li presented “‘Listen Remember and Recreate’: Jazz 101 in Occupied Japan” at AMS. She is starting a job as Associate Editor (Japanese and Korean publications) at Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) in New York City this fall.

Destiny Meadows presents at AMS. (Photo credit ken tianyuan Ge)

Sara Lindmark presented “Come Out and Dance: The Lesbian Liberation of Manhattan’s Gay Bars in the Early 1970s” at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in April. She was awarded the Marcia J. Citron Graduate Research in Musicology Award, which will fund research this summer for her dissertation, “From Jukebox to DJ: Dance, Desire, Technology, and Liberation in Manhattan’s Gay Bars, 1968-1974.”

Kari Lindquist received the Margery Lowens Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Society for American Music. She presented her research at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Feminist Theory & Music Conference. Her book review for Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism was published in Notes, the Journal of the Music Library Association in June.

Destiny Meadows presented “Aerobic Sound, Neoliberal Bodies: Fashioning the ‘New American Person’ in the US Cultural Imaginary” at AMS. She also won two awards this Spring: The Madeleine L’Engle Travel Research Fellowship from Smith College and The Poulton Family Endowed Summer Research Fellowship from UNC. Destiny was also elected student representative for the AMS-SE chapter alongside Joshua Harton.

Briana M. Nave presented “Writing About Music: Valuing Women’s Subjectivity” at the Tau Beta Sigma women in music event on March 1st. She also presented “Writing From a Body: Ellen Willis’s Pro-Sex Rock Criticism” for the Harvard University Graduate Music Forum Conference on April 12; this year the theme of the conference was music criticism. Most recently, she presented “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Musical Symbolism and Health Propaganda in Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith” at the UNC-KCL joint conference in May.

Erin Pratt was awarded a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Graduate School for this coming year, 2024-2025.

Matteo Sammartano completed his Master’s degree with his thesis “The Night Unraveled: Nocturnal Significances in Seventeenth-Century French Court Ballets” under the advisement of Anne MacNeil. He also served on the organizing committee for the 13th Annual UNC-KCL Graduate Student Music Conference, held at UNC in May.