Rachel Brashier

Rachel Brashier is currently a graduate student in Ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music, and is doing fieldwork in chant and religious music within diaspora communities of Orthodox Christians in the United States. She completed a BM in vocal performance and music education at Eastern Illinois University in 1999, and taught music for twelve years in the Chicagoland area before completing a MM in Music History at Southern Illinois University in 2012, where her thesis concerned the hymns of women in Byzantine chant of the Greek Orthodox Church, on which subject she presented at the Feminist Theory and Music Conference in 2011. Her current interests surround the transfer of musical knowledge through sensory embodiment and gesture.