Graduate Students

I am a composer and improviser in the Music Composition PhD program. My music often plays with the relationship between the musician and their instrument or, more recently, between the voice and the body. I try to use technology to extend and disrupt these relationships. In practice, this means I am learning to use sensor technology and controller design to build new musical instruments and sound installations.

I grew up in Quito, Ecuador, and obtained my BA from Columbia University. Between 2017 and 2019, I completed MMus programs in Composition and Sonic Arts at Goldsmiths,...

I use ethnographic methods to study the role of audio communication in contentious political environments. My dissertation, entitled “Sounding Through the Firewall: A Narrative of Audio Communication Between Taiwan and China,” examines the recent history of the Taiwan Strait (1949-today) from the perspective of music and sound.

Originally from the Boston area, I completed a B.A. in Music and Comparative Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to my doctoral studies, I spent a year in the Dominican Republic, during which I studied the intersection of jazz with Afro-...

Soren Nyhus is a first-year Musicology PhD student at UC Berkeley. He received a Bachelor’s in Music from Harvard University in 2022 and an MPhil in Music from Cambridge University in 2023. His master’s thesis, “The Italian Renaissance in Viennese Opera of the First World War”, investigates the ways in which portrayals of the Renaissance in operas performed at the Vienna Hofoper during World War I navigated questions of ethnic, religious, and political identities. He is broadly interested in questions of modernism and nationalism in the early twentieth century, especially in the German-...

Virginia Georgallas is a PhD Candidate in Musicology. She holds an Associate Diploma in Piano Performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and she completed a BMus in Piano Performance and an MA in Musicology at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation proposes an alternative approach to the philosophical aporias and political challenges presented by musical style, beginning with a return to eighteenth-century conceptions of style that had yet to congeal into the institutionalized hierarchies and racialized schemas of nineteenth-century disciplinarity. Her research...