Graduate Students

Caitlin Belem Brown Romtvedt

Ethnomusicology

Caitlin Belem Brown Romtvedt is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology. Born and raised in Buffalo, Wyoming, she grew up in a Basque community in a musical family. After high school, she spent a year in Brazil as a Rotary exchange student, which sparked an enduring interest in Brazilian music, dance, and society. At Oberlin College, she graduated with a Latin American studies major and a dance minor. Between Oberlin and UC Berkeley, she spent extensive time in Brazil, Cuba, and the Basque Country and made a living teaching and performing Brazilian and Latin music, Basque music, and North...

Mia Yun

Ethnomusicology

Rosie Ward

Musicology

I focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music, with particular interests in: political singing and ideas/ideals of song in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolutions; music and the history of environmental and climate science; song, timbre and music aesthetics in relation to articulations of the human. I came to Berkeley for my PhD in 2017, following a BA in Music, French and German (University of Cambridge, 2014) and an MMus in Musicology (King’s College London, 2016). Between my musicological studies, in 2014–15 I enjoyed working in a bookstore and then teaching English to...

Aine Nakamura

Composition
My voice is of and with my body. I pursue sensibility and spirituality as my aesthetics through a focus on the nuanced possibilities of my voice. I am song itself.

I recently focus on orality and movements of body. My theatricality is represented in my weaving of stories and imageries through my embodiment and sometimes objects. My artistic quest began as a search for my own language to embrace and express self, which cannot be told simply through one disciplinary or cultural frame. I moved closer to my woman artist identity, acknowledging my transnational complexity and ambiguity. I cross...

Everardo Reyes

Everardo “Ever” Reyes (Rarámuri descent and Chicanx) is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the intersections between music, social movements, and Indigenous self-determination. His dissertation focuses on the contemporary sonic and political influences of the 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz Island by the Indians of All Tribes on Indigenous social movements. Ever also works on Rarámuri and Nahuatl language revitalization through music technology and songwriting with the Indigenous Poetics Lab at the Arts Research Center and...

Allison Jerzak

Musicology

Allison Jerzak’s research on the history of digital music and music recommendation sits at the intersection of Historical Musicology, Science and Technology Studies, and Critical Data Studies. Her work experience in the technology sector — first at Epic Systems as a Project Manager, and then at the Willy Street Co-op as a Data Analyst — sparked an interest in sociotechnical systems. In particular, she became interested in how workers at various technology companies were seen as “experts” in fields such as healthcare, despite often having only technical expertise. Over time...

Collin Ziegler

Musicology

Collin researches French musical thought in the Third Republic, examining how musicians and writers turned to surprising texts, histories, and contexts—particularly related to the Symbolist and phenomenology movements—as alternatives to the musical thought circulating in Parisian institutions like musical societies and the Paris Conservatoire. Collin is particularly interested in how these discourses evolved around a changing conception of text, in which discourses about writing and communication inspired new thought about the experience of music.

Collin recently presented papers at...

Ryan Gourley

Ethnomusicology

Ryan Gourley is an ethnomusicologist working at the intersection of global music history and cultural mobility studies. His research explores issues of imperialism, political ideology, and musical aesthetics in Northeast Asia and the former Soviet Union. He currently serves as the Secretary of the Music Study Group of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and the webmaster of the Cold War and Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society (AMS). He is currently the Norman Jacobson Memorial Fellow at the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC...

Jonathan Turner

Ethnomusicology

Ph.D. Candidate in Ethnomusicology with a Designated Emphasis in New Media.

My research focuses on relationships between musicians, makers, and instrument-repair-technicians in California, USA and São Paulo, Brazil. I investigate how the creative processes of both musicians and those who make and maintain their instruments are influenced by economics, climate change, pedagogical structures, automation, and cultural politics of technology.

Raised in Phoenix, Arizona, I completed a certificate program in guitar building at Roberto-Venn School of...

Ian Mahanpour

Musicology