PhD candidates receive UChicago and AMS awards

Graphic with a yellow background and white text reading "awards"


Jonah Francese, a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology, is the recipient of the Cathy Heifetz Memorial Award. The Cathy Heifetz Memorial Award was established to commemorate the life and honor the memory of Cathy Heifetz (1949-1976), who came to The University of Chicago in 1973 as a student in the Department of Music. The Memorial’s first endowment created an annual award to honor a student in the Department of Music whose associations as a member of this community have been singularly marked by a spirit of caring and helpfulness.

Jonah Francese headshot

Jonah is a 5th year PhD student in ethnomusicology, with interests ranging in wedding music, Afro Mexican music, and Indigenous hip hop. He has a forthcoming article about language revitalization in hip hop, focusing on his own journey reclaiming his abuelita's language of Hñähñu. Aside from academia, Jonah runs an 18 piece big band called Thinkin' Big, which has toured all across the U.S. and Canada. They released their newest album "Reclamation" on all platforms in fall 2019. As a musician, his greatest musical moment was opening for Salt-N-Pepa at a music fest in Boston.

Anne Monique Pace, a PhD candidate in Music History and Theory, is the recipient of the American Musicological Society Midwest Indiana University Press Award for best student paper for her paper titled "War Clowns: Probing the Gap Between Stravinsky's Petrushka (1911) and Pulcinella (1920)."

Anne Monique is also the recipient of the 2021-22 Karen DiNal Memorial Award for excellence in the teaching of writing to first-year College students.

The Karen DiNal Memorial Award is in honor of Karen DiNal, a beloved long-time intern and assistant director of the Writing Program who died, very prematurely, after a long illness. She was a sympathetic and insightful mentor to undergraduate and graduate students and an innovative teacher; her work with new instructors set an example of productive and supportive mentoring that has been an inspiration to the Writing Program ever since. 

As a result, the award recognizes two Writing Interns who have proven exceptional teachers and mentors to first-year students in College CORE writing seminars.

Anne Monique Pace headshot

Anne Monique Pace is a PhD candidate in Music History and Theory at the University of Chicago. She received her BA in 2017 from Columbia University, where she studied Music, English Literature, and Creative Writing with an emphasis on constructions of gender, race, and sexuality in performance. Her dissertation will focus on commedia dell’arte figures in theater, opera, and ballet at the turn of the 20th century, probing the intersections of clowns/clowning and changing conceptions of the human subject. Topics of investigation will include social othering, bodies, and sound. Other active areas of research include affect, genre, embodiment, and the performance of identity in a variety of theatrical traditions. She also studies classical voice and Argentine tango.