About
Devon (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Music History and Theory. His dissertation, entitled Navigating the Boundaries of Voice: Song, History, and Humanity in the British Imperial Project, 1770–1836, explores eighteenth-century singing cultures and colonial discourses of voice, humanity, and history in late Georgian Britain. The project considers how marginal actors engaged with the musical voice (through singing, listening, teaching, and documenting) and defined their relationship with empire and nascent constructions of whiteness. His work is currently supported by a Predoctoral Fellowship for Excellence through Diversity at the University of Pennsylvania. He also received an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society and a Mellon Foundation – University of Chicago Dissertation Completion Fellowship. He was previously the LGBT Studies Research fellow at Yale University (2020) and a Stuart Tave Humanities Teaching fellow at the University of Chicago (2019). A former recipient of the Eileen Southern Fund grant from the American Musicological Society’s Committee on Cultural Diversity, he previously served on the Society’s Committee on Race & Ethnicity. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and holds Master’s of Music degrees from The Johns Hopkins University Peabody Conservatory in Early Music Performance (Voice) and in Musicology.
Teaching Experience
- Queer Singing | Queer Spaces (Spring 2020, instructor)*
- Introduction to Western Art Music (Fall 2018, instructor)
- Opera as Idea & as Performance (Spring 2018, course assistant)
- Topics in Music History I, II, III (Fall 2016–Spring 2017, course assistant)
*Tave Teaching Fellowship, cross-listed in music and gender studies