Board of Trustees

Denise Von Glahn is Professor of Musicology in the College of Music at Florida State University where she served as Director of the Center for Music of the Americas for twelve years and Curtis Mayes Orpheus Professor and Coordinator of the Musicology Area for seven. She currently serves as President of the Society for American Music. Her scholarly interests include the music of Charles Ives, music and place, ecomusicology, music and identity, music and gender, music and institutions, and biography. She has published essays, articles, and book chapters, as well as a critical edition of Leo Ornstein’s Quintette for Piano and Strings, and five books: The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape, (which won the 2004 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award); Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices, written with Michael Broyles, (which won the 2009 Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music); Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World, (which won the 2015 Pauline Alderman Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music); Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life, (2017, a part of the University of Illinois Press, Music in American Life Series); and Circle of Winners: How the Guggenheim Foundation Composer Awards Shaped American Music Culture that appeared in 2023 and won Von Glahn a second ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. She takes enormous pleasure in working with students and directing theses and dissertations on a range of topics that explore US American music culture and has been recognized at two different universities with awards for excellence in teaching.

Jeffrey Magee teaches and writes about music in the United States, with research focusing on jazz, popular song, and musical theater, particularly the ways artists from marginalized backgrounds collaborated and shaped American popular music. He is the author of The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz (Oxford, 2005), winner of SAM’s Irving Lowens Award and an award from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. His second book, Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater (Oxford, 2012), was supported by the NEH and was runner-up for the Lowens Award. His current book project is tentatively titled Gypsy and the American Dream. Recent articles have won the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award (2024) and the Kurt Weill Prize (2021). His work has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, American Music, Black Music Research Journal, Studies in Musical Theatre, and Musical Quarterly, as well as The Cambridge History of American Music and The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington. He has lectured at the Library of Congress, 92Y, Harvard University, and many other colleges and universities, and has served on review panels for the NEH, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. Before joining the University of Illinois, Magee taught at Indiana University and served as executive editor of the NEH-funded series Music of the United States of America. At Illinois, he has served as Director of the School of Music (2012–19), Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Media (2019–22), and interim Head of the Department of Journalism (2025–27).

Monica A. Hershberger is Associate Professor of Music at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. Her research centers on the history of opera and musical theatre in the United States. She is particularly interested in the work of singers. Her first book, Women in American Operas of the 1950s: Undoing Gendered Archetypes, was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2023. She is currently finishing her second book, a biography of Dorothy Maynor (1910—1996), an African American soprano and the founder of Harlem School of the Arts.

Monica attended her first meeting of the Society for American Music in Charlotte in 2012. Since then, she has regarded SAM as her scholarly home. She looks forward to attending the conference each spring and to receiving each issue of the Journal of the Society for American Music. Monica chaired SAM’s Public Relations Committee from 2018—2020, remaining on the committee for another two years. She was elected to the SAM Board of Trustees in 2024. Before taking on the role of Secretary, she served as the liaison for honors, awards, and subventions for approximately two years.

Douglas W. Shadle, an Associate Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University, is a scholar of orchestras and orchestral music in the United States. A two-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, Shadle is the author of two books, Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford, 2016) and Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony (Oxford, 2021). He regularly consults on audience engagement projects for orchestras around the world.

Dr. Trudi Wright is Professor and Chair of the Music Program at Regis University and is currently serving as the President-Elect of the Society for American Music. Her experiences as a college educator led her to write the co-edited essay collection Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music (University of Illinois Press, 2024). She is also the co-editor of Open Access Musicology, a peer and student reviewed journal intended for undergraduate music students and has published scholarship on musical theater and labor in sources like American Music and Studies in Musical Theatre. She lives and works in Denver, Colorado with collaboration at the center of all her endeavors.

David Garcia is Robin March Hanes Distinguished Professor in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Garcia’s research focuses on the music of the Americas with an emphasis on Black music and Latin music of the United States and a theoretical focus on race and historiography. The Society for Ethnomusicology awarded his book, Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins (Duke University Press, 2017) the 2018 Bruno Nettl Prize for Outstanding Publication in the History of Ethnomusicology. The Society for Ethnomusicology and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology also recognized the book with an Honorable Mention for the Alan P. Merriam Prize for Outstanding Book in Ethnomusicology and Commendation, respectively. The Association for Recorded Sound Collections awarded his first book, Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music (Temple University Press, 2006), a Certificate of Merit in the category Best Research in Folk, Ethnic, or World Music. He is also a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (2014–15). Garcia served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Society for American Music (2020–21). He is also a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (2014–15). His current research focuses on the long nineteenth-century history of Latin music, dance, and culture in the United States.

Christi Jay Wells (they/them, she/her) is an associate professor of musicology at Arizona State University’s School of Music, Dance and Theatre and a Race, Arts & Democracy Fellow with ASU’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. An interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of jazz history, popular music studies, dance studies, and arts and cultural policy, they received their doctorate in 2014 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her doctoral dissertation on drummer/bandleader Chick Webb and swing music in Harlem during the Great Depression received the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award and UNC’s Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology. She has also received Videmus’s Edgar A. Toppin Award for Outstanding Research in African American Music, a Morroe Berger/Benny Carter Jazz Research Fellowship from the Institute of Jazz Studies, and the Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music.

A social jazz and blues dancer for twenty years, Wells has been a lecturer and clinician at national and international dance workshops. Their first book Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance (Oxford University Press, 2021) explores the complex intersections between jazz music, social and popular dance, race, power, and discourse from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century. Between Beats received the Kealiinohomoku Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Dance, Movement and Gesture section and was a finalist for the Dance Studies Association’s de la Torre Bueno First Book Award and the Woody Guthrie First Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch. She has published articles in the journals Women & Music, Jazz & Culture, Journal of the Society for American Music, and Daedalus and have multiple chapters on jazz dance history topics for volumes in the Oxford Handbook series. They are currently working on their second book: a study of the Smithsonian Institution’s substantial history of jazz programming and patronage (from Dr. Wells’ faculty page at ASU).

Jonathan A. Gómez is an assistant professor in the department of musicology in the University of Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance, where he is also affiliated faculty with the department of Afroamerican and African Studies. Gómez studies Black American musics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, particularly popular musics. His work is situated at the intersection of music studies and Black studies, with abiding interests in music analysis and semiotics via linguistic anthropology. Gómez is currently at work on a book project tentatively titled The Way We Play: Hearing Black American History and Musical Identity (under contract with University of Chicago Press), in which he explores how Black Americans hear and represent themselves in musical sound. His work has been published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2024) and The Journal of Musicology (2026). Gómez earned a Ph.D. in Music with a secondary field in African and African American Studies from Harvard University in November of 2022, an M.A. in Musicology from Michigan State University in 2018, and a B.M. in Studio Music and Jazz from the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music in 2016. He remains an active jazz saxophonist.

Within SAM he is a current member of the board, Development Committee, Committee on Conferences, and Long Range Planning Committee, and a former member of the Program Committee (Detroit 2024).

Steph (Del) Doktor is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Temple University, and her research and teaching ask, “How can we hear inequality?” Her current book project, Reconstructing Whiteness: Race in the Early Jazz Marketplace (under contract with University of California Press), examines how white Americans used jazz to rehearse racial privilege. Doktor’s research has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, Open Access Musicology, Jazz & Culture, and American Music as well as in several edited collections of essays centered on popular music. Her article, “Finding Florence Mills” received the 2022 Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society of American Music. She is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Jazz Studies and is co-authoring future editions of the textbooks Jazz and Jazz Essentials (under contract with W. W. Norton & Company) with Charles Carson.

Doktor’s commitment to equality exceeds the boundaries of her teaching and research. She is an elected official of her institution’s union, Temple Association of University Professionals (Local 4531); helps run a monthly Marxist reading group for music scholars; and volunteers for The Everywhere Project, a nonprofit providing access to harm reduction resources in Philly.

Nancy Yunhwa Rao is the Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Music at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Holding a Ph.D. in Music Theory from the University of Michigan, she began her career as a theorist writing about American ultra-modernist composition and treatises. Her “Ruth Crawford’s Imprint on Contemporary Composition” won the 2007 Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music. Rao’s publications have provided innovative analytical approaches to cross-cultural music, and enhanced public discussions about cultural encounter in music. Through her scholarship, as well as teaching, she has promoted diversity and advanced knowledge and dialogue about the complexity of diversity issues in music scholarship. Rao’s books include Chinatown Opera Theater in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2017; Chinese translation 2021; Music in American Culture Prize, American Musicological Society; Irwin Lowens Book Prize, Society for American Music; Humanities and Cultural Studies Prize, Association for Asian American Studies; Certificate of Merit, Association for Recorded Sound Collections) and Inside Chinese Theater: Community and Artistry in Nineteenth-Century California and Beyond (University of Illinois Press, 2025). Ongoing projects include Music and Sound in Transpacific East Asia: Transformations and Trajectories, co-edited with Hannah Chang and Hedy Law (Palgrave, 2026) as well as Translating the Field, co-edited with Susan Thomas and Michael Iyanaga. Rao is the Editor-in-Chief of American Music, an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

William Robin is an associate professor of musicology at the University of Maryland’s School of Music. His research and writing untangle the complex cultural and institutional histories of contemporary classical music in the United States. His first book, Industry: Bang on a Can and New Music in the Marketplace (Oxford University Press, 2021), examines the new-music festival Bang on a Can and their participation in major shifts in the 1980s and 1990s as the American avant-garde pivoted towards the marketplace. His second book, in collaboration with Kerry O’Brien, is On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement (University of California Press, 2023), a revisionist history of musical minimalism told through the presentation and contextualization of more than a hundred primary sources. As a public musicologist, Robin has contributed to The New York Times and hosted the podcast Sound Expertise.