The North American British Music Studies Association
NABMSA Officers
Officers | Board of Directors | Committees | Newsletter | Honorary Members
President
Jennifer Oates (through 31 December 2025)
Jennifer Oates is Library Director at Carroll College. Her work on music in Britain ranges from composer-centered studies of Hamish MacCunn (including her 2013 Hamish MacCunn (1868-1916): A Musical Life in Routledge’s Nineteenth-Century British Music series) and Sir Granville Bantock to depictions of Scotland in music to modernism in British music. She has edited critical editions of MacCunn’s overtures and songs for the Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries series as well as performance editions of selected MacCunn partsongs with Yelton Rhodes Music. In addition to presenting at national and international conferences, she has published on British music, information literacy, and music librarianship in various collections of essays and scholarly journals. Her article, “Engaging with Research and Resources in Music History Courses” in spring 2014 issue of The Journal of Music History Pedagogy, received the Music Library Association’s 2016 Richard S. Hill Award for best article on library instruction/pedagogy. She is also one of the founders.
Vice-President
Dawn Grapes (through 31 December 2026)
K. Dawn Grapes is an Associate Professor of Music in the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at Colorado State University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate music history and research courses. Her research focuses on the music and musicians of Early Modern England. In addition to assorted articles and book chapters, her publications include two books: With Mornefull Musique: Funeral Elegies in Early Modern England (Boydell, 2018) and John Dowland: A Research and Information Guide (Routledge, 2020). She is currently awaiting publication of a new Dowland biography by Oxford University Press. Grapes is the program annotator for the Denver-based Colorado Bach Ensemble and the Fort Collins Symphony, and is also a flutist who performs regularly along the Colorado Front Range.
Treasurer
Ruth Eldredge Thomas (through 31 December 2026)
Ruth Eldredge Thomas is a PhD candidate at Durham University. A recovering early music addict, she is writing a dissertation on Hubert Parry’s relationship to the reception of JS Bach. An organist by training, she is currently general editor of the Complete Organ Works of C. Hubert H. Parry, forthcoming 2021 from Wayne Leupold Publishers (Durham, NC). She is particularly interested in issues of race and equity in historiography and musicological practice. After working in the live classical music industry for a decade, in 2015 she began a private consultancy to advocate for research initiatives that combine science, technology, and creative fields, and to equalize access to technology career pathways to underrepresented populations. She is currently an advisor to five National Science Foundation-funded projects that specialize in building research initiatives focused on broadening participation and creative methods in STEM education pathways. A native of Denver, Colorado, Ruth completed a BM and MM in Organ Performance at Brigham Young University, and an MSt in Musicology at the University of Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall).
Secretary
Deborah Heckert (through 31 December 2025)
An active scholar of 19th and 20th-century British music studies, Deborah Heckert is the author of Composing History: National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860–1925, and has essays in the volumes Elgar and His World, British Music and Modernism, 1995-1960, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism and the forthcoming Vaughan Williams in Context. Her current research interests focus on British modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century, the role of history in the identity politics of 19th and 20th century British music, and the intersections between British music and the visual arts. She teaches in the Department of Music at Stony Brook University, where she is also undergraduate program director. She also teaches at New York University and Brooklyn College, CUNY.
Deborah is a founding member of NABMSA. She is also currently a member of the American Musicological Society’s Committees for Career-Related Issues and Membership and Development.
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Board of Directors
Rachel M. Bani (through 31 December 2026)
Rachel M. Bani is an Assistant Professor of Musicology in the Petrie School of Music at Converse University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate music history, global music, and music research courses. She specializes in the musical traditions of Scotland and the eighteenth and nineteenth century British empire more broadly. Her current research explores the intersections of Scottish Gaelic language song tied to nineteenth century land reform movements, connecting that history to ongoing calls for land equity and climate activism in the United Kingdom. Her article “The Remarkable Jenny Cameron: Song and the Rebellious Scotswomen of the 1745 Jacobite Rising” was recently published in Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. She is also a 2024–25 short-term Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at The Huntington Library, for her project ‘“I’d rather consort with Judas’: Scottish Gaelic Song and Popular Reactions to the Sutherland Clearances.”
Stewart Duncan (through 31 December 2025)
Stewart Duncan received his Ph.D. in musicology from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 2022 and was recently appointed as Assistant Teaching Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His work addresses music and politics in the early twentieth century, specifically choral music, nationalism, and amateur performance. His dissertation examines the close relationship between choral singing and politics in England in the 1930s, from public protest to government-sponsored diplomacy. Recent research includes presentations on interwar antifascist singing at meetings of the American Musicological Society, the McGill University Music and Antifascism Symposium, and NABMSA, and his article “‘An Excellent Piece of Propaganda’: The British Council’s Use of Choirs as Cultural Diplomacy in the 1930s”, published in The Musical Quarterly in 2022.
Rosemary Golding (through 31 December 2026)
Rosemary Golding is a Senior Lecturer in Music at The Open University UK. Her research addresses aspects of the social and cultural history of music in nineteenth-century Britain, specifically music education, the music profession, and the relationships between music, health and wellbeing. Her publications include Music and Academia in Victorian Britain (Ashgate, 2013), Music and Moral Management in the Nineteenth-Century English Lunatic Asylum (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), The Music Profession in Britain 1780-1920: New Perspectives on Status and Identity (Routledge, 2018), and the four-volume documentary history Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2023). She is currently leading an interdisciplinary network on Psychiatry and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Britain which draws together historians from a variety of disciplines, as well as practitioners in the creative arts, health, heritage and archives.
Ashley A. Greathouse (through 31 December 2026)
Ashley A. Greathouse researches a broad range of cultural and musical topics, from eighteenth-century Britain to the present-day metaverse. Her 2024 PhD dissertation—“Urbane Promenades and Party-Jangling Swains: Music and Social Performativity in London’s Pleasure Gardens, 1660–1859”—critically examines the intersections of music, class, and gender in Britain’s most significant urban outdoor venues during the long eighteenth century, highlighting shifts in class- and gender-based power in British society while also exposing the prevalence of patriotic whitewashing in pleasure garden art and music that masked the leisure economy’s imperialist underpinnings. Greathouse recently co-authored a chapter about title sequence music in streaming historical drama series for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Television. She is currently undertaking interdisciplinary projects on the English pleasure gardens and on extended reality rhythm/dance games. Greathouse has presented extensively at international conferences and served on numerous academic society boards and conference committees. Ashley is also a co-founder and core organizer of the annual AMS/SMT After Dark comedy panel and a past President of the Cincinnati Contra Dancers. She is a soprano and an active instrumental performer on bassoon, clarinet, harp, and piano.
Vivian Teresa Tompkins (Student Member through 31 December 2025)
Vivian Teresa Tompkins is a PhD student in Musicology at Northwestern University and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Northwestern’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program. She holds a BA in Music from Furman University (2017), an MSt in Music (Musicology) from the University of Oxford (2018), and an MS in Library and Information Science from Syracuse University (2021). Her research focuses on women’s music-making in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, particularly their performance of devotional music in domestic contexts. She is also interested in work at the intersection of musicology, library science, and the digital humanities, and intends to pursue a career in music librarianship.
Danielle Ward-Griffin (through 31 December 2025)
Danielle Ward-Griffin is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her research examines the performance, mediatization, and production of twentieth- century opera, focusing in particular on Benjamin Britten and television broadcasting. Articles on these topics have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society</em, Cambridge Opera Journal, Opera Quarterly, Journal of the Society for American Music, Theatre Journal, and Music & Letters. She has also contributed chapters to Rethinking Britten, Essays on an Inexplicit Art: Benjamin Britten Studies and Benjamin Britten in Context. For her writing, she has received the 2019 Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson award from ASCAP, the 2020 Westrup Prize, and the 2020 Solie Award from NABMSA. She is currently writing a book on opera on television in the UK, US, and Canada (under contract with Oxford University Press).
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Committees
Development Committee:
Vanessa Rogers (chair)
Vicki Stroeher
Ann Van Allen-Russell
Danielle Ward-Griffin
Membership Committee:
Elizabeth Morgan (chair)
Rachel Bani
Nick Jones
Online Events Committee:
Stewart Duncan (chair)
Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Rebecca Thumpston
Vivian Teresa Tompkins
NABMSA Review Committee:
Thornton Miller (chair)
David Kidger
Kathleen McGowan
Byron Adams Award Committee:
Erin Johnson-Williams (chair)
Christina Baade
Jason Rosenholtz-Witt
Diana McVeagh Book Prize & Ruth Solie Prize Committee:
Christina Fuhrmann (chair)
Joanna Bullivant
Michael Burden
Ryan Ross
Diana McVeagh Editions Prize:
Roberta M. Marvin (chair)
Dorothy de Val
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Linda Shaver-Gleason Awards Committee
Christopher Scheer (chair)
Emily Hoyler
Leanne Langley
Justin Vickers
Blog/Social Media Committee:
Imani Mosley (chair)
Ashley Greathouse
Christopher Hoster
Website Committee (ad-hoc):
Ruth Eldredge Thomas (chair)
Jonathan Hicks
Jennifer Oates
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Honorary Members
Allan Atlas
Byron Adams
Linda Austern
Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Ruth Solie
Nicholas Temperley
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