Faculty & Staff

Tammy L. Kernodle is University Distinguished Professor at Miami University, who specializes in African American music (concert and popular) and gender studies in music. Her work has appeared in major peer-reviewed journals including American Studies, Musical Quarterly, Black Music Research Journal, The Journal of the Society of American Music (JSAM), American Music Research Journal, The U.S Catholic Historian, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS).

Kernodle is the author of biography Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams. She served as Associate Editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of African American Music and was one of the Editors for the revision of the New Grove Encyclopedia of American Music.

Kernodle served as the Scholar in Residence for the Women in Jazz Initiative at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City from 1999 until 2001. Kernodle is currently serving as scholarly consultant with New World Symphony’s Harlem Renaissance initiative, which seeks to elevate the music and voices of black artisans.

Katie Graber’s research focuses on race, ethnicity, immigration and colonization in a variety of contexts, including Western opera, the history of ethnomusicology, and Mennonite music. She has served as co-chair of the Society for Ethnomusicology Voice Special Interest Group, and as Intercultural Editor for the Mennonite Church USA and Mennonite Church Canada’s denominational hymnal Voices Together. In the latter role, she worked with a variety of consultant groups and individuals to edit more than 40 languages in hymn texts of multiple musical traditions. She has presented her research at numerous national and international Mennonite and musicology/ethnomusicology gatherings.

Dr. Birgitta J. Johnson is a jointly appointed Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of South Carolina. At USC she teaches courses about world music, hip-hop, the blues, African music, Black sacred music, Beyoncé, and the history of ethnomusicology. Her research interests include music in African American churches, musical change and identity in black popular music, and gospel archiving. She has published articles in the Black Music Research Journal, Ethnomusicology Forum, Liturgy, Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies, and the Grove Dictionary of American Music. Her recent publications include chapters about 21st century gospel archiving, gospel remixes of Beyoncé songs, and sacred themes in the music of Outkast for three different edited books.

Dr. Johnson has been quoted or featured in Rolling Stone Magazine, NPR, Vox, Public Radio International, PBS, VIBE, and South Carolina ETV. A multi-instrumentalist and singer, she has performed professionally or recorded with ensembles from a variety of genres. She was recently featured in the 2024 PBS documentary series, Gospel, produced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. She recently hosted a three-year live music series with the Columbia Museum of Art titled More Than Rhythm: A Black Music Series Hosted by Dr. Birgitta Johnson. The series has companion podcast episodes through the CMA’s BINDER podcasts available on all music streaming platforms.

Kristen M. Turner teaches in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. She co-authored Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher’s Guide (Routledge, 2022) with Horace Maxile, which won the 2023 AMS Teaching Award for an Exceptional Pedagogical Resource. Her research on American operatic culture and popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, Musical Quarterly, the Journal of Musicological Research, and a number of collected editions including Carmen Abroad: Bizet’s Opera on the Global Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which received the 2021 RMA/Cambridge University Press Outstanding Edited Collection Book Prize. Her second book, Singing Like Citizens: Opera, Race, and American Popular Entertainment in the Ragtime Era is under contract with the University of Illinois Press. She is past president of the AMS-Southeast Chapter and has served on the Society of American Music’s Board of Trustees.

Marcus R. Pyle is Franco Professor of the Humanities and Assistant Professor of Musicology at Davidson College and has degrees from Juilliard, Royal Academy of Music, Dartmouth, and NYU. He is also the Artistic Director of the Davidson Concert Series, sponsored by WDAV, and President of the American Musicological Society, Southeast Chapter. Prior to Davidson he held positions at Tufts University and MIT. He is the recipient of the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship from the AMS. His recent research has been published in 19th-Century Music and in the Journal of Popular Music Studies. He is guest editor of Opera Quarterly, on the editorial board of Musicology Now, and is editor for Oxford’s Grove Dictionary of Music for topics 1900-present.

Deborah Wong is an ethnomusicologist and Professor Emerita of Music at the University of California, Riverside. She is a former SEM president. She has written three books and served as editor for Nobuko Miyamoto’s extraordinary memoir, Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution (2021). Committed to public sector work at the national, state, and local levels, she serves on the boards of Great Leap and RILM. Her happiest hours of the week are spent going on air with her weekly radio show Gold Mountain for KUCR 88.3 FM in Riverside. She was a member of the Taiko Center of Los Angeles for many years and still dances bon-odori every summer in Southern California Obon gatherings. She is a core member of the collaborative team that activated critical ethnography to conduct interviews with 45 women published in the new book Riverside Women Creating Change: Stories and Inspiration from Activists and Organizers (Inlandia Institute, 2024).