Jennifer Iverson is a scholar of twentieth-century music, with a special emphasis on electronic music, avant-gardism, sound studies, and disability studies. Jennifer’s research explores the interaction between bodies, technologies, and sound, drawing together music analysis, archival research, and cultural history. Jennifer’s book, Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde, under contract with Oxford University Press, analyzes the cultural impact of mid-century electronic music produced in and around the WDR studio in Cologne, Germany. In particular, the electronic music studio provided a crucial space to reclaim wartime technology and ideas and put them to artistic use. The electronic studio also engendered a paradigm of invisible collaboration, where composers, technicians, scientists, and performers worked in a laboratory-like environment to develop a shared framework of ideas that applied to both electronic and acoustic musical compositions. Related articles appear in the journals Tempo, Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Music Analysis, twentieth-century music, and Music Theory Spectrum.
Jennifer’s second research area is disability studies, which analyzes historical and cultural ideas about disabled bodies. Along this line, she has written about Bjork’s oeuvre, the film Dancer in the Dark, and the disabled body in electronic music in venues such as the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (Oxford, 2015), Sounding Off (Routledge, 2006), and the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
In the 2015-16 academic year, Jennifer was an External Faculty Fellow in residence at the Stanford Humanities Center. Jennifer currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) in the Department of Music and on the Council of the American Musicological Society. She previously led the Disability and Music Interest Group and served on the Accessibility Committee and on the editorial board of Music Theory Spectrum within the Society for Music Theory. Jennifer taught at the University of Iowa from 2009 – 2015.