A music historian who works across disciplines and creative practices, I was drawn to the college fellows program as a way to engage first year students in the challenge and pleasure of playing with ideas. I’m fascinated by the idea of sound as fundamental to the ways we move through the world and deeply committed to the idea that learning about sound is not for musicians only.

My class engages aesthetics through the concept of noise.  We will use the idea of noise to ask questions about aesthetics and difference. We will think about the ways that our positions as listeners effect our ability to move through the world. We will listen to noise as it relates to power, economics, the environment, love, the body, race, gender, and class. in our own city. The class will include a playlist of aural encounters including music, readings from a variety of fields, and hands on noise making activities.

At the University of Virginia, I have taught a variety of classes in the music department where I am a Professor. I have also enjoyed teaching classes cross listed with Women and Gender Studies and a Pavillian Seminar. I am a founding faculty member of the Equity Center at UVa and a co-director of the Sound Justice lab. I also work with students in a variety of community engagement programs grounded in the arts including. I co-founded  C-Ville Tulips and the Arts Mentors.

I have just published a book with the University of Chicago Press called  Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano and other strange sounds. The book explores connections between machines, bodies, sound and voice. My first book, Monteverdi's Unruly Women as about the intersection of gender, desire, and sound at the end of the Italian Renaissance. My latest book length project is still looking for a title. It focuses on sound, music, and race in two locations: Monticello and New Orleans. I’ve published in Slate, The Washington Post, the New York Times and play Rock, Classical, and Jazz viola around Charlottesville.