Current Research

In my primary area of research, I examine the ways in which people used music and dance as a form of self-fashioning, articulating and forming their identities in respect to questions of race, gender, and class. To that end, my most recent and forthcoming publications have examined popular engagement with the Argentinian tango in Paris, Chicago, and New York in the years prior to World War I.

Publications:

“Dance, Dining, and Urban Social Life in Too Much Mustard and its Responses.” In U.S. Illustrated Sheet Music, 1830-1930, ed. Theresa Leininger-Miller and Kenneth Hartvigsen, London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, expected 2025.

“The 1913 ‘Tango Issue’ in the City of Neighborhoods” In Dancing on the Third Coast: Chicago Dance Histories, ed. Susan Manning and Lizzie Leopold. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming.

Book Review: Balanchine and Kirstein’s American Enterprise by James Steichen. Journal of the Society for American Music 15, no. 3 (August 2021): 354-356. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196321000249 .

Secondary Area

Drawing on my experience as a cellist on both modern and historical instruments, I explore historical performance practices of the early twentieth centuries, particularly those associated with modernist aesthetics.

Publications:

Album Review: French Cello, Marc Coppey, violoncello, with the Orchestre philharmonique de Strasbourg and John Nelson (Audite, 2022), Nineteenth-Century Music Review (January 2024): 1-4. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479409823000447.

“Cello” Article and Annotated Bibliography, Oxford Bibliographies Online 23 June 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780199757824-0293 .

Dissertation Project

My dissertation, entitled “La Méthode graphique: Representation, Media, and Dance, 1852-1912,” was defended in Spring 2021. Through an exploration of technologies of representation that were used to record dance in France between 1852 and 1912, including notation, scientific graphs, photography, and film, I demonstrated how dance theory interacted with broader historical discourses concerning representation, temporality, and the body. Attempts to record dance, I argued, reveal how dancers, theorists, and choreographers situated their art in the context of these developments. I also showed how methods of dance notation can be taken as a part of a larger history of media and representation in the years around 1900.

Publications:

“Stepanov's Musical Anatomies.” In The Routledge Companion to Choreomusicology, ed. Samuel N. Dorf, Simon Morrison, and Helen Minors. Routledge, forthcoming.

“Dance and Comedy in Le Piano irrésistible.” In Körper und Klänge in Bewegung, ed. Stephanie Schroedter. Vienna: mdw Press/transcript, expected 2024.

“La Méthode graphique: Representation, Media, and Dance, 1852-1912.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2021.