The North American British Music Studies Association
NABMSA Officers
Officers | Board of Directors | Committees | Newsletter | Honorary Members
President
Christina Bashford (through 31 December 2023)
Christina Bashford is Professor of Musicology at the University of Illinois and a historian of musical life in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Born and educated in the UK, she spent the first part of her career there, then moved to the US in 2005. She is the author of The Pursuit of High Culture: John Ella and Chamber Music in Victorian London (Boydell, 2007), a book that explores the sacralization of classical music through the lens of a jobbing musician with astute business instincts who rose to become the leader of an internationally famous concert institution. She has also published numerous book chapters and journal articles on related topics. Her study of the function and cultural significance of music-making in the Ballykinlar internment camp during the Anglo-Irish conflict of 1919-21 appeared in the centennial-prize issue of Music and Letters (May 2019). She has co-edited three books: Music and British Culture, 1785-1914: Essays in Honour of Cyril Ehrlich (with Leanne Langley; Oxford University Press, 2000); The Idea of Art Music in a Commercial World, 1800-1930 (with Roberta Montemorra Marvin; Boydell, 2016); and Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War I (with William Brooks and Gayle Sherwood Magee; University of Illinois Press, 2019). Her current writing project, a book on violin culture in Britain, c.1870-1930, is supported by an NEH Fellowship. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Christina has served as President of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association and was the host of NABMSA’s 2012 conference in Urbana-Champaign.
President-Elect
Jennifer Oates (through 31 December 2023)
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 2024)
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 2024)
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 2023)
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
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.
Erin Johnson-Williams (through 31 December 2024)
Erin Johnson-Williams is Lecturer in Music Education and Social Justice in the Department of Music at the University of Southampton. Her research focuses on decolonisation, the imperial legacies of music education, trauma studies, gender and maternity, and soundscapes of colonial violence. Erin’s Leverhulme project, entitled ‘Audible Incarceration: Singing Communal Religion in Colonial Concentration Camps’, examines the role of singing, religious experience and trauma in spaces of colonial incarceration, with particular focus on the concentration camps of the South African War. Erin is currently working on several interdisciplinary publication projects, including co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism (forthcoming 2024); an interdisciplinary volume entitled Intersectional Encounters in the Nineteenth-Century Archive: New Essays on Power and Discourse (forthcoming 2022), and writing a monograph on sound and biopolitics in spaces of colonial incarceration.
Elizabeth Morgan (through 31 December 2024)
Elizabeth Morgan is Associate Professor of Music at Saint Joseph’s University, where she also co-directs the program in Gender Studies. Her primary research area is women’s music making in nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States. She has published articles on the performance of accompanied sonatas in early nineteenth-century British homes, the study of piano etudes by British amateur keyboardists in the early nineteenth century, the composition and performance of battle pieces during the American Civil War, and music making during the Mexican-American War. She is currently working on an article that re-examines the lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery during World War II. Elizabeth is also a pianist who maintains a career playing chamber music and solo repertoire.
Vanessa L. Rogers (31 December 2023)
Vanessa L. Rogers is Associate Professor of Music History at Rhodes College, where she teaches music history and literature courses and is a faculty affiliate of the Gender and Sexuality Studies program. Her primary area of research is 18th-century and early 19th-century English stage music, and she has published on the subjects of Henry Fielding’s ballad operas, French theatrical influences on London repertory, and iconography and orchestral seating in English theatres in the Georgian era. With Berta Joncus and Zak Ozmo she has also published a critical edition of Isaac Bickerstaff’s Love in a Village (OPERA / Bärenreiter, 2020). Her current focus is a book on comic opera in eighteenth-century Britain (in preparation).
Rebecca Thumpston (31 December 2023)
Rebecca Thumpston is a Teaching Associate at the University of Nottingham, UK. She completed her PhD examining agency in twentieth-century British cello music at Keele University, and she holds a BA and MA from the University of York. At present, Rebecca is researching a book exploring the pioneering life and career of British cellist Beatrice Harrison. Rebecca is the editor, with Nicholas Reyland, of Music, Analysis, and the Body: Experiments, Explorations, and Embodiments (Peeters, 2018) and she has published on agency in the music of Elgar, Britten, and Simon Holt. She has also published, with Barbara L. Kelly, on “Maintaining the Entente Cordiale: Musicological Collaboration between the United Kingdom and France” (Revue de musicologie, 103/2, 2017). Prior to coming to Nottingham, Rebecca was a Research Associate at the Royal Northern College of Music.
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 SocietyCambridge 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
2023 Symposium Program Committee:
Christina Baade
Jo Hicks
Vanessa Rogers (Board Liaison)
Matthew Williams
NABMSA Review Committee:
Thornton Miller (chair)
Annika Forkert
David Kidger
Kathleen McGowan
Blog/Social Media Committee:
Imani Mosley (chair)
Ashley Greathouse
Christopher Hoster
Development Committee:
Justin Vickers (chair)
Lidia Chang
Trevor Nelson
Ann Van Allen-Russell
Linda Shaver-Gleason Awards Committee
Christopher Scheer (chair)
Emily Hoyler
Leanne Langley
Justin Vickers
Membership Committee:
Jennifer Oates (chair)
Jon Churchill
Sarah Kirby
Janet McCumber
Nominations Committee:
Anthony Barone (chair)
Fiona Palmer
Jason Rosenholtz-Witt
Ryan Ross
NABMSA Conferences Manual (ad hoc working party):
Christopher Scheer (co-chair)
Charles McGuire (co-chair)
Jennifer Oates
Eric Saylor
Justin Vickers
Amanda Eubanks Winkler
Diana McVeagh Prize & Ruth Solie Prize Committee:
Christina Fuhrmann (chair)
Allan Atlas
Michael Burden
James Brooks Kuykendall
Julian Rushton
NABMSA Online Events Committee:
Stewart Duncan (chair)
Roberta Montemorra Marvin
Rebecca Thumpston
Vivian Teresa Tompkins
Website Committee (ad-hoc):
Ruth Eldredge Thomas (chair)
Stacey Jocoy
Deborah Heckert
Imani Mosley
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Honorary Members
Allan Atlas
Byron Adams
Linda Austern
Ruth Solie
Nicholas Temperley
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