Introducing the 2016 Editorial Team

Greetings everyone and Happy March! 

We would like to introduce the editors of Ethnomusicology Review this year. We are excited to tell you about our continuing and new staff members, who will be responsible for the publication of our Journal Volume and the curation of Sounding Board.

This past fall we were able to publish our 20th Journal Volume online, thanks to the hard work of our authors, editors, and our Journal Volume Editor John Widman. We are now accepting articles for our 21st Volume and look forward to once again bringing you a diverse body of work. In addition to the Journal Volume, Sounding Board has been producing interesting reviews, editorials and blogposts. Our editorial team is made up of a diverse group of people from the Ethnomusicology and Musicology Departments at UCLA, in addition to independent scholars working outside of Los Angeles. We look forward to the expansion of the editorial team outside the limits of UCLA and we will strive to continue engaging with new perspectives in music.

Rose Boomsma is our Editor-in-Chief. She is a Wisconsin native and a graduate of Howard University. Her undergraduate studies focused on Western classical music and her passion for flute playing led her to explore flutes from other cultures. For her master's degree in ethnomusicology, she wrote about Native American flute and its appropriation into New Age culture. She is now expanding her studies to Australia to explore another case study of how Indigenous music styles are taken up by majority culture members.

John Widman is Managing Editor for the Journal Volume and a third year graduate student in UCLA’s Ethnomusicology Department where he specializes in researching the music of China’s Zhuang minority. In addition to Chinese music, John has interests in global expressions of various genres of rap and hardcore. He is further involved in researching sound studies and music listening preferences in extreme environments derived from his experiences as a wild land firefighter.

Rosaleen Rhee is Managing Editor of Sounding Board and a graduate student in the UCLA Department of Musicology and the Urban Humanities Institute Certificate Program. She completed her B.A. in Music at Brown University, and received an M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Washington. Her current research focuses on the folk music scenes in New York City and Seoul, Korea during the 1960s and questions how contestation in public spaces reflect contestation in political identities. Her other interests include music and multimedia, critical race studies, and the sustainability of performance venues. 

Mehrenegar Rostami is our Reviews Editor. A native of Tehran, she is at present a PhD student at UCLA with an interest in the music of Silk Road cultures. After completing her B.A. in the Field of Music at Azad University of Tehran, where she studied the Persian traditional music repertoire, she continued her studies in Musicology and Dance at University of Salzburg. She received her M.A. in ethnomusicology from Memorial University of Newfoundland. Her further research interests include intercultural musical encounters, improvisation, Middle-Eastern music, capitalism & globalization, politics, and philosophy.

Marissa Ochsner is our Technical Editor. She is a graduate student in the UCLA Department of Musicology and the Digital Humanities Certificate Program. Her research focuses on funding sources and concert venues in twentieth-century America. 

Associate Editors of Sounding Board

Otto Stuparitz curates Notes from the Field, which features stories about scholars conducting fieldwork from all over the world. He is a Chicago native and received his BA in music history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he researched aesthetics and distribution networks within the local recording studio scene. His current graduate work at UCLA focuses on ways in which technology, law, and distribution networks affect traditional and popular musics of Indonesia. 

Maureen Russell curates From the Archives and informs us about the contents of UCLA’s expansive Ethnomusicology Archive. She is head of cataloging and archivist at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive, one of the largest and oldest ethnographic audiovisual archives in North America. She is an active participant in a variety of campus and professional organizations. She was three-time president of the UCLA Library Staff Association, president of the UCLA Graduate School of Library and Information Science Alumni Association and twice chair of LAUC-LA (Librarians Association, University of California, Los Angeles).

Dean Reynolds has been curating Space is the Place, which combines ethnomusicology with jazz studies. He is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, where he is currently writing his dissertation on jazz musicians and listeners and their uses of recording technologies and new media. Dean has taught undergraduate music courses at City College, the New School, Princeton, and elsewhere, and he is a double bassist.

In June, Molly Jones will be taking over Dean's position as Associate Editor of Space is the Place. Molly is an improviser and composer. She is a member of Polyfold, an experimental music collective based in Detroit, and takes an interest in the AACM, Black Artists’ Group, and other efforts to promote improvised/free/creative/Great Black music. As an M.F.A. candidate in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology (ICIT) at the University of California, Irvine, her thesis work incorporates conduction, video, and interactive sampling.

Gabriel Lavin manages Historical Perspectives. He is a first year graduate student in UCLA's Ethnomusicology Department. In addition to playing the ud and guitar, his research interests are Indian Ocean history with a focus on the musical traditions of the Arabian Peninsula. He lived, traveled, and performed throughout the Arab world in the years leading up to his recent arrival in Los Angeles. 

Pablo Infante Amate manages Bring the Noise, which presents work related to popular music studies. Pablo is a graduate student in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, where his work is supported by a Fulbright Scholarship. He is interested in the music of Equatorial Guinea and his current research analyzes the effects of development policies and structural adjustment programs on the popular music of this tiny Central African country. He holds degrees in music education, musicology, and percussion performance from several Spanish universities.

Ben Cosgrove manages the Ecomusicology section. Ben is a multi-instrumentalist and touring composer/performer whose work focuses on the human experience of landscape. He grew up in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and he graduated from Harvard College in 2010. More about him can be found at www.bencosgrove.com.

Daniel Castro Pantoja curates Crossing Borders, which highlights trans-disciplinary work involving music. Daniel is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at UCR and his dissertation deals with the life and work of Colombian composer Guillermo Uribe Holguín (1880-1971) and his role in the formation of a national music identity in Colombia during the first half of the twentieth century. He is a native of Colombia and earned his Bachelors in classical guitar performance from Loyola University New Orleans and a Masters degree in music performance from The University of Akron, where he studied with guitar pedagogue extraordinaire Stephen Aron. Currently, he is a lecturer at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia where he teaches a graduate seminar that focuses on Latin American music research.

Thank you to all past editors, especially Schuyler Whelden, the outgoing Managing Editor. We hope to keep you informed about current issues in the field of music studies at large and look forward to publishing the 21st Journal Volume this coming fall!