The North American British Music Studies Association
NABMSA Officers
Officers | Board of Directors | Committees | Newsletter | Honorary Members
President
Jennifer Oates (through 31 December 2027)
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
Trevor R. Nelson (through 31 December 2027)
Trevor R. Nelson is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Wichita State University and a scholar interested in the connections between music, politics, and identity formation. Central to his work are questions of how music education practices and institutions contribute to and maintain historical inequities. His research centers the post-1945 British Commonwealth and how music informed globally minded Britishness. His book project, Let’s Make a Commonwealth: Musical Britishness at the Twilight of Empire, considers music as a form of educational media that teachers and broadcasters used to reform British identity in the wake of imperial decline. Secondary research interests include music education radio and television programs, children’s musical cultures, and music and tennis. His writing has appeared in Twentieth-Century Music, Ethnomusicology Review, Notes, NABMSA Reviews, and the edited collection Mass Observing the Coronation of Charles III. At WSU, he teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in ethno/musicology.
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Board of Directors
Rachel M. Bani (through 31 December 2027)
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.”
Kirsten Barker (Student Member, through 31 December 2027)
Kirsten Barker is a musicology PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she is also an active member of the East Central Illinois Master Naturalist program. Her dissertation is on British Antarctic-centric music and music-related material culture since 1900. She is particularly interested in conceptions of wilderness, empire, and exploration as pertains to musical works and objects.
Lidia Chang (through 31 December 2028)
Lidia Chang is a flutist and musicologist whose work examines the intersection of gender, literature, print culture, organology, and music performance practices in England during the long eighteenth century. She has served as the managing editor for Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture and has presented her research at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s annual and regional meetings, the American Musical Instrument Society, the Galpin Society, the American Musicological Society, the North American British Music Studies Association, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 2023 Lidia found her dream job at Colorado College as an assistant professor in the music department.
Stewart Duncan (through 31 December 2028)
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 2027)
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.
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Committees
Development Committee:
Vanessa Rogers (chair)
Stewart Duncan
Danielle Ward-Griffin
Justin Vickers
Membership Committee:
Elizabeth Morgan (chair)
Rachel Bani
Nick Jones
Online Events Committee:
Rachel Bani (chair)
Dorothy de Val
Jonathan Hicks
Vivian Teresa Tompkins
NABMSA Review Committee:
Nuria Bonet (chair)
Alison Gilbert
Kathleen McGowan
Martin Scheuregger
Byron Adams Award Committee:
Charles McGuire (chair)
Deborah Heckert
Eric Saylor
Diana McVeagh Book Prize & Ruth Solie Prize Committee:
Joanna Bullivant (chair)
Michael Burden
Jonathan Rhodes Lee
Kevin Salfen
Linda Shaver-Gleason Awards Committee
Leanne Langley (chair)
Lidia Chang
Trevor R. Nelson
Christopher Scheer
2026 Program Committee
Nuria Bonet (chair)
Peter Kohanski
Rebecca Thumpston
Jason Rosenholtz-Witz
Temperley Prize Committee
Alison Mero (Chair)
Stewart Duncan
Brooks Kuykendall
Philip Rupprecht
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Honorary Members
Allan Atlas
Byron Adams
Linda Austern
Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Ruth Solie
Nicholas Temperley
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