Alumni Placement

Graduates of the PhD program in Music at UChicago have been appointed to fellowships and professorships in composition, ethnomusicology, and music history and theory at colleges and universities across the country and around the world. Click the links below to see where graduates are now. 

Alumni: Have an update? Let us know!

2022-23
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Anna Beatrice Gatdula "Spectacles of a Nuclear Empire: Opera and Film in the American Atomic Age, 1945-2018"
Assistant Professor of Musicology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Maria Kaoutzani "For a While"
Assistant Professor of Music (Composition), University of Oklahoma School of Music
Joshua Klopfenstein "The Practice of Music Theory in England Before the Civil War"
Co-Founder, Lindenwood Marketing
Erol Gregory Mehmet Köymen "Listening for Secular Bodies: Western Art Music, Occidentalism and Belonging in Neo-Liberal Istanbul"
Assistant Professor of Musicology, Florida State University College of Music
Eva Pensis "Mighty Real: Trans Femme Embodiment, Queer Nightlife, and the Cultural Politics of Transmisogyny"
Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Trans Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Yuting Tan "Amnesia"
Instructor, Composition (four-year contract), Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, National University of Singapore
2021-22
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Jon Edward Bullock "Radio Kurdistan: Iraqi Kurdish Music, Colonial Power and the Transformation of Tradition "
Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, Notre Dame
Rodrigo Bussad ""TESSERACT" ACT I. For Amplified Soprano Saxophone Quartet and Octophonic Speaker Array"
Composer,
Barbara Dietlinger "Music and Commemoration in Early Modern Europe: Visual and Sonic Intersections of Remembrance"
Assistant Professor of Music History, University of North Texas College of Music
Ailsa Lipscombe "Precarious Bodies: Viral Listening to Sound, Silence and Trauma"
Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music
Theodore Stuart Moore "tap"
Faculty, Music Engineering and Technology, Peabody Institute - Johns Hopkins University
Andrew Malilay White "The Improvised Text: Bodily Regimes of Piano Performance in the Nineteenth Century"
Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music
2020-21
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Alican Çamci "Saha Araştirmasi (Fieldwork) for Large Ensemble and Electronics"
J. Donald Feagin Professorship of Music and Film Studies, The University of Tulsa
Rebecca Flore "Organizing the Sound of the Voice: Western Music’s Relationship with Recorded Speech, 1965–2020"
Special Collections Metadata Librarian, University of Chicago
David "Clay" Mettens "stain, bloom, moon, rain for 13 instruments"
Faculty, Composition, Roosevelt University
Ted Moore "tap for percussion trio, tape, and DMX lights"
Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Huddersfield, UK
2019-20
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Julianne Grasso "Video Game Music, Meaning, and the Possibilities of Play"
Visiting Assistant Professor of Music, University of Texas, Austin
Jack Hughes "Needlepoint: For Large Orchestra"
One-year teaching position, Cleveland Institute of Music
John Y. Lawrence "Listening in Color: Sonority, Style, and Meaning in Europe 1760–1830"
Humanities Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago
Joseph Maurer "Learning and Teaching Musical Heritage in Immigrant Chicago"
Humanities Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago
Tommaso Sabbatini "Music, the Market, and the Marvelous: Parisian Féerie and the Emergence of Mass Culture, 1864–1900"
British Academy Newton International Fellow, University of Bristol
Laura Shearing Turner "Sounds of the Modern Backwoods: American Old-Time Musics, Heritage, Place"
Kluge Fellowship, Library of Congress
Bradley Spiers "Music and the Spectacle of Artificial Life"
Humanities Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago
2018-19
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
George Adams "Listening to Conceptual Music: Technology, Culture, Analysis"
Humanities Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, University of Chicago
Nadia Chana "To Listen on Indigenous Land: Method, Context, Crisis"
Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin Madison
Zhuqing "Lester" Hu "From 'Ut Re Mi' to Fourteen-Tone Temperament: The Global Acoustemologies of an Early Modern Chinese Tuning Reform"
Assistant Professor, University of California Berkeley
Bertie Kibreah "Banter and Bricolage at the Burial Chamber: Dialectical Devotionalism in Bangladesh"
Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, Indiana University
Ameera Nimjee "Moving Bodies: The Politics of Mobility in Indian Contemporary Dance"
Assistant Professor, University of Puget Sound
Jessica Gabriel Peritz "The Lyric Mode of Voice: Song and Subjectivity in Italy, 1769-1815"
Assistant Professor, Yale University
Melanie Zeck "Well-Regulated Amusements and the Longitudinal Viability of Robert Owen's 'Plan for the Amelioration of the Condition of Mankind': New Harmony, Indiana, 1825-1874"
Research Assistant, American Folklife Center, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress
2017-18
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
William D. Buckingham "Recollecting Isleno Decimas: Louisiana's Lost Tradition of Spanish Ballad"
Visiting Assistant Professor, Tulane University
Ted Gordon "Bay Area Experimentalism: Music and Technology in the Long 1960s"
Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Music, Columbia University
Pierce Gradone "That Dark Electric: Concerto for Trombone and Chamber Ensemble"
Assistant Professor of Music, Knox College
Anabel Maler "Hearing Form in Post-Tonal Music"
Assistant Professor, University of Iowa
Timothy Page "'Oru' for Chamber Orchestra and Objects"
Lecturer in Music and Digital Arts, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Igor Santos "Suggested Affinities: For Solo Piano, Large Ensemble and Electronics"
Rome Prize & Guggenheim Fellowship,
Lindsay J. Wright "Discourses of Musical Talent in American Culture"
ACLS Fellowship and Assistant Professor, Yale University
2016-17
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Dan Wang "Scenes of Feeling: Music and the Imagination of the Liberal Subject"
Assistant Professor of Music, University of Pittsburgh
Abigail Fine "Objects of Veneration: Music and Materiality in the Composer-Cults of Germany and Austria, 1870-1930"
Assistant Professor of Musicology, University of Oregon
Sarah Iker "An Experience-Oriented Approach to Analyzing Stravinsky's Neoclassicism"
Lecturer of Music, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
August Sheehy "Music Analysis as a Practice of the Self in Nineteenth-Century Germany"
Assistant Professor, Stony Brook University
Braxton Shelley "Sermons in Song: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination"
Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Assistant Professor in the Department of Music, Harvard University
Mari Jo Velasco "Popular Song, Revolution, and Devotional Culture in the French Pyreneese, 1780-1850"
Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts,
2015-16
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Iddo Aharony "Kolot"
Visiting Assistant Professor in Music Technology, Colorado College, in Colorado Springs
Chelsea Burns "Listening for Modern Latin America: Identity and Representation in Concert Music, 1920-1940"
Professor, University of Texas at Austin
Genevieve Dempsey "The Sacred Sound of Congado: Performing Songs of Devotion, Race, and Gender in Afro-Brazilian Religious Communities"
Lecturer in World Music, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lauren Eldridge "Playing Haitian: Musical Negotiations of Nation, Genre, and Self"
Professor, Washington University St. Louis
Cesar Favila "Music and Devotion in Novohispanic Convents, 1600-1800"
Assistant Professor in Musicology, University of California Los Angeles
Tomas Ignacio Gueglio Saccone "'On Love' Triptych based on William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (For Two Actors, Soprano, and Ensemble)"
Lecturer in Music Theory, Northwestern University
Rehanna Kheshgi "Sounding Rural Modernities: Gender, Performance, and the Body in Assam, India"
Assistant Professor of Music, St. Olaf College
Katherine Pukinskis "And It Was Quiet"
Preceptor in Music Composition, Harvard University
Ana Sanchez Rojo "Music, Opinion, and Press in Late-Eighteenth Century Madrid"
Assistant Professor of Music, Tulane University
Michelle Urberg "Music in the Devotional Lives of the Birgittine Brothers and Sisters at Vadstena Abbey (c. 1373 – 1545)"
Lecturer in Music History, University of Washington
2014-15
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Andrew Cashner "Faith, Hearing, and the Power of Music in Hispanic Villancicos, 1600-1700"
Assistant Professor of Music, University of Rochester
Daniel Gough "Listening in the Mega City: Music in Sao Paulo's Cultural Policy Worlds"
Visiting Professor, Tulane University
Alisha Jones "'We are a Peculiar People': Meaning, Masculinity, and Competence in Gendered Gospel Performance"
Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, Indiana University
Andrea Jordan "House Around Irish Music: Past and Present in Discourses of Irish Music from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Centuries"
Lecturer, University of California Davis
Yuan-Chen Li "Wandering Viewpoints: Concerto for Cello and Two Ensembles"
Visiting Assistant Professor, Reed College
Andrew Mcmanus "Killing the Goat: Opera in Seven Scenes"
Adjunct Instructor, St. Xavier University
Marcelle Pierson "The Voice Under Erasure: Singing, Melody, and Expression in Late Modernist Music"
Lecturer in Music Theory, University of Pittsburgh
Peter Smucker "A Listener-Sensitive Analytic Approach to Elliot Carter's Late Chamber Music, 1990-2012"
Assistant Professor and Director of Music Theory, Stetson University
Claudio Vellutini "Cultural Engineering: Italian Opera in Vienna, 1816-1848"
Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia
Lillian Wohl "The Musical Labors of Memory: Jewish Musical Performance in Buenos Aires"
Postdoctoral Scholar, University of California Los Angeles
2013-14
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Andres Carrizo Aleman "Alucinaciones"
Founder and Artistic Director, Panama's Cultural Attaché to Israel, MusicArte Panama Contemporary Music Festival
Michael Figueroa "Music and the Jerusalem Question: Song, Poetry, and Politics in Israel, 1967-Present"
Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Shawn Keener "The Giustiniana Phenomenon and Venetian Cultural Memory, 1400-1600"
Editor, A-R Editions
Trent Leipert "Feeling in the Cracks: Subjective Binds in European New Music"
Lecturer, University of Regina
Michael O'Toole "Sonic Citizenship: Music, Migration, and Transnationalism in Berlin’s Turkish and Anatolian Diasporas"
Assistant Director, UChicago GRAD
2012-13
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Melissa Bilal "Thou Need'st Not Weep for I Have Wept Full Sore: An Affective Genealogy of the Armenian Lullaby in Turkey"
Assistant Professor, American University of Armenia
Mary Caldwell "Singing, Dancing, and Rejoicing in the Round: Latin Sacred Songs with Refrains, circa 1000-1582"
Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Jonathan Gregory "Musical Instruments, Bodies, and Cognition"
Associate Professor, Western University (CAN)
Katarzyna Grochowska "Tenor Circles and Motet Cycles: A Study of the Stary Sacz [PL-SS Muz 9] And Its Implications for Modes of Repertory Organization in 13th Century Polyphonic Collections"
Adjunct Assistant Professor, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Suzanne Scherr "Puccini's 'Manon Lescaut:' compositional process, stylistic revisions, and editorial problems"
Assistant Dean, Western Music; Full Time Music Faculty, SIAS University (China)
Dylan Schneider "Chamber opera 'Strip-Tease' to the libretto of Slavomir Mrozek"
Visiting Professor in Music, Amherst College
Martha Sprigge "Aibilities to Mourn: Musical Commemoration in the German Democratic Republic (1945-1989)"
Assistant Professor, UC Santa Barbara
Suzanne Wint "The Western Classical Music Scene in Kampala, Uganda: A Music of the Other?"
Instructor, The Princeton Review
2011-12
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Andrew Mall "“The stars are underground”: Undergrounds, mainstreams, and Christian popular music"
Associate Professor of Music, Northeastern University
2010-11
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Erika Honisch "Sacred Music in Prague, 1580-1612"
Associate Professor, History/Theory, Stony Brook University
Name Dissertation Title Job Placement
Andrei Pohorelsky "In Search of Ragtime: Music, Race and Capital in the American Twentieth Century"
Assistant Professor of Musicology, Stanford University
Siavash Sabetrohani "Music Theory between the Public Sphere and Nationalism in Eighteenth Century Berlin "
Postdoc, Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, 2024-25, Freie Universität Berlin
David Frederick Shuve-Wilson "Media Dominance: Music, Nation and Pedagogies of Emotion in Modern Taiwan and China, 1928-2022"
Assistant Professor, Harvey Mudd College