Scholarship Connecting the Past to the Present
How do you decide if music is “good” or “bad”?
How do you distinguish between music that is “excellent” from music that is merely “good”?
I try to answer such questions through histories of music, money, and cultural policies
In addition to several books, I am the author of scholarly articles and popular-press blog posts and op-eds. I serve as Director of the American Music Research Center (AMRC) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, I am a co-founding member of the Equitable Arts Infrastructure Research Group, and I am Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale University.
My scholarship has been supported by an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Fellowship, and Leverhulme Trust International Network Grant.
Just released is a Colloquy I edited in American Music (2025/6) on the topic of Music Studies PhDs and the Job Market. In the Introduction, I shared the latest data on the numbers of tenure-track professor jobs in ethnomusicology, musicology, and music theory, and the number of graduate students completing PhDs each year.
In what ways do money, power, and policy influence the arts? Should the government support the arts? What role do private funders play?
Director of the AMRC
At the University of Colorado, Boulder, I serve as the Director of the American Music Research Center.
The American Music Research Center supports the research, performance and preservation of all musics of the Americas with a particular emphasis on the diversity of musics from the United States. As a scholarly and inclusive organization, we are committed to public outreach and community engagement as well as serving a diverse array of musicians, academics, librarians and researchers.
Recent Events
How do we build more equitable and sustainable infrastructures to help us lead more artful lives?
Equitable Arts Infrastructure Research Group (EAIRG)
(Top row) Paul Bonin Rodriguez, Sarah Wilbur, Charlotte Canning, Derek Miller; (Bottom row) Michael Sy Uy, Jasmine Mahmoud, Colleen Hooper. At the “Building an Equitable Arts Infrastructure” Symposium at the University of Texas, Austin, February-March 2025, funded by an NEH grant.
We are a group of scholars and artists studying and transforming arts infrastructure. We believe in conversation and collaboration.
See our book series through the University of Texas Press, Arts in Context: Critical Performance Infrastructures.
In what ways does our training as scholars, activists, and artists condition us to avoid, disengage, or collapse in the face of public and civic engagement?
Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale
At CILY, I am a member of Executive Director Frances Pollock’s Brain Trust and I lead a think tank on Public-Facing Scholarship. This think tank brings together cultural leaders, scholars, artists, investors, and civic officials to rethink the role of the humanities in society.
Most recently at the 2026 Yale Innovation Summit, think tank members participated in a panel titled, “From Academy to Public: Approaches to Democratizing Humanities Scholarship.” Among the topics discussed were “trust and truth in higher education,” the humanities as alleged “university cost centers,” and moving from “content to production.”
Alexandria Carrico, Sarah Wilbur, and me at the October 2025 think tank gathering at the Yale School of Music.