My Teaching in Focus

I am a seasoned university instructor and passionate advocate for students with over a decade of experience teaching and supervising in higher education.

I have an interdisciplinary teaching profile that spans undergraduate and graduate level courses, from introductory survey courses on the History of American Rock & Pop and the History of Western Art Music, to issues and methods courses in Popular Music Studies and Historical Musicology, to special topics seminars in Sound Studies, Voice Studies, and Disability Studies.

I have taught a range of class-sizes, from General Education lectures of up to 400 students, to small seminars of less than 10 students. I have managed large teams of graduate Teaching Assistants, and have led teams of co-instructors, including performance faculty.

I supervise MA and BA theses on a range of topics related to popular music and identity. I am currently open to expressions of interest from prospective PhD students.

As a teacher and mentor, I bridge vulnerability and care with intellectual rigour in order to inspire trust in my students and promote a culture of what Jonathan Sterne — my late mentor — termed “intellectual risk-taking.” As a disability studies scholar committed to social justice, I use a range of learning modalities in my teaching — including music performance and improvisation — to foster diversity and inclusion in the classroom, and to ensure my students feel a sense of belonging.

Read about my 2025 course offerings below. See my CV for a complete list of courses taught.

Fall 2025 Courses

University of Copenhagen

  • This undergraduate level course imparts foundational knowledge of key subject areas, central issues, interpretive and methodological traditions, and ongoing developments in the field of popular music studies.

    Students will gain insight into scholarly discourse and knowledge dissemination on popular music, as they develop the analytical frameworks for thinking critically and communicating effectively about popular music in an academic setting.

  • This Faculty of Humanities-wide joint graduate and undergraduate course approaches the aesthetic nexus of pleasure and pain from diverse interdisciplinary theoretical fields including affect theory, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and the medical humanities, while drawing on analytical approaches in art history and visual culture, musicology, theatre and performance studies, and comparative literature in connection with the expertise of the course instructors.

    A central objective of this course is to confront normative constructions of "pleasure" and "pain" by foregrounding marginalized creative perspectives that reflect on the pleasure/pain continuum as a diverse physiological, emotional, cultural, and political experience in accordance with the inherent diversity of human embodiment and identity formation.

Spring 2025 Courses

University of Copenhagen

  • This upper-division undergraduate course explores the nature and politics of vocality in diverse cultural and musical contexts, while rethinking basic assumptions about the voice, its implicit role in systems of power, and its foundational role in music. As this course closely integrates research with performance through weekly research seminars and performance workshops, it will equip you with the technical vocabulary and theoretical and methodological frameworks for both analyzing and creatively interrogating diverse representations of vocality. You will come away from the course with a deeper understanding of the phenomenological, relational, social, and aesthetic complexities of vocality as a vital area of musicological and creative inquiry.

  • This undergraduate level course seeks to impart a general understanding of the major periods, styles, aesthetics, and socio-cultural developments in Western music from c. 1450 to the present. Through offering nuanced insight into a select number of musical works, composers, and musicological issues through case-study based learning, students will sharpen their critical listening skills, while deepening their understanding of diverse genres of music. The course will strengthen your ability to think critically and communicate effectively about music and musicological issues.