resume

New Book

Analyzes how White American mainline Protestants used the internal musical controversies of the turn-of-the-millennium Worship Wars to negotiate their shifting position within the nation's diversifying religious and sociopolitical ecosystems.

What if simply changing musical styles could resurrect social power and religious vitality? By the early 1990s, Christianity was losing ground nationally, and mainline Protestants were trending even Whiter and older than America's overall demographic trajectory. The churches knew they needed to diversify. Yet, many mainline churches focused their energies on the so-called Worship Wars, intense aesthetic and theological controversies running through much of White Christian America. Historically, churches had only supported one musical style; now, many mainline Protestant congregations were willing to risk internal schism to support both Contemporary worship—centered around guitars, praise bands, and choruses—and Traditional worship with its pipe organs, chancel choirs, and hymns. Surely, they thought, musical diversity would broadcast tolerance and bring in new members—perhaps it would even help them regain their historically central role in American society. Based on years of ethnographic research, (White)Washing Our Sins Away explores how American mainline Protestants used internal musical controversies to negotiate their shifting position within the nation's diversifying religious and sociopolitical ecosystems.

Hardcover : 9781438489612, 266 pages, August 2022

Research and Scholarship

My research addresses how humans experience meaning through sound and addresses topics such as contemporary experiences of traditional sacred musics, the role of music and sports in society, the globalized music industry, and live music in the digital age. My most recent paper, “(White)washing our Sins Away: Race, Music and Symbolic Violence in American Churches” was presented at the 2018 Society for Ethnomusicology meeting. My work on music in the United States relates to my broader research on the transnational sacred music industry. For example, my forthcoming 2019 article “ESL: English as a Sacred Language in German Evangelical Worship Music” integrates social geography techniques to explore the Anglophone worship music industry’s linguistic transformation of contemporary Christian music and communities in the context of globalization and Americanization. This work, which will be published in Springer’s The Changing World Language Map explores blurring linguistic boundaries, imagined communities, and socioeconomic tensions across borders.

Other aspects of my research develop new theories about how humans perceive music. My 2015 Yearbook of Traditional Music article on collaborative fieldwork, co-authored with Dr. Fredara Hadley, explores the dynamics of working together in the field. I also analyze innovative uses of technology in student assignments in a pedagogy article recently featured in Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments. This article resulted from a Music and Sports course that I developed for Syracuse University, which attracted a roster and waitlist of music majors, music industry students, journalism students, and Division One student-athletes every semester it was offered. In summer of 2019, I guided the Public Religion Project team from University Colorado, Boulder’s Center for Media, Religion and Culture on a study trip to the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music in Fes, Morocco.