Autumn 2019 Alumni News

Dr. Alisha Lola Jones is an Assistant professor of ethnomusicology in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University (Bloomington). Her article “You Are My Dwelling Place: Experiencing Black Male Worship as Aural Eroticism and Autoeroticism in Gospel Performance” was published in the Women and Music journal (October 2018) and her book Flaming?: The Peculiar Theo-Politics of Fire and Desire in Black Gospel Performance is now under contract with Oxford University Press. In April 2019, she was a consultant on the research team that designed the opening concert series "Soundtrack of America" for The Shed in New York, directed by Steve McQueen with Quincy Jones as the chief music advisor, Greg Phillinganes as the music director, and Dr. Maureen Mahon as the lead research consultant. The premiere was covered in the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, The Economist, Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and The New York Times. In summer 2019, she was invited to present research at Oxford University in London and at the Chautauqua Institute in New York; and to preach at St. Paul's Cathedral in London and at Spelman College for their 2019 Baccalaureate. Lastly, through her production firm Insight Initiative, she has gained live production credit with YouTube, Google, and the Tribeca Film Festival this year.

In 2019-20, Anabel Maler began her first year on the tenure track as Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Iowa, a position she accepted after teaching at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music in the 2018-19 academic year. At the University of Iowa, she is continuing her work on post-tonal form, listener-centered theories of form, disability and Deaf studies, and sign language music. Currently, she is working on projects pertaining to sign language rap, as well as music theory's epistemic exclusions. She has also recently been appointed chair of the SMT Accessibility Committee.

Composer Andrew McManus (PhD 2015) has been appointed Limited Term Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Georgia Hugh Hodgson School of Music for the Spring of 2020.

In 2018, Cesar Favila was appointed Assistant Professor of Musicology in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Favila’s primary focus for his research and teaching is music of Mexico, from colonial New Spain through the contemporary Chicano experience. His current book project, Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain, addresses sacred music and its intersections with urban culture, gender, race, mysticism, and other fine arts in colonial Mexico City and Puebla. Also in 2018, he was a Thoma Visiting Scholar in Latin American Colonial Art at UT Austin’s Blanton Museum and Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, and in 2020 he will become a Faculty Fellow of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education.

Jacob Bancks is associate professor of composition and musicianship at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL and keeps busy in the IL/IA Quad Cities giving informal public lectures on music, writing program notes for the Quad City Symphony, directing church music, and commenting regularly on local public radio. He was honored to receive an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for 2019. In 2020, the Quad City Symphony will stage his first opera Karkinos, co-commissioned by Living Proof Exhibit and inspired by over thirty in-person interviews with people whose lives have been impacted by cancer. Other current projects include a large cycle of solo piano music for pianist Kuang-Hao Huang and a concerto for clarinetist Ricardo Morales, co-commissioned by the Quad City Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Mariusz Kozak, PhD '12 and Assistant Professor of Music and Music Theory at Columbia University, has published a new book with Oxford University Press. The book, titled Enacting Musical Time: The Bodily Experience of New Music, addresses the nature of musical time from the perspective of embodied and enacted cognition, and explores the body's natural mobility and its affective dispositions as resources for shaping our understanding of musical phenomena.

Nathan Bakkum, Associate Professor of Music at Columbia College Chicago has just been appointed Senior Associate Provost for Academic Operations at the college  beginning in January 2020. In this role, he will be providing curricular and operational leadership across the College's sixteen academic departments and supporting the 7000 undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled at Columbia College. The appointment extends through August 2023.