Out now: Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s British Pop
Shortlisted for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame/Pop Conference 2022 Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award
I write about the history of popular music, performance, gender, and culture. My particular area of expertise is singers and singing: I’m interested in how people learn to sing, what the sounds of singers voices have meant to listeners across historical periods, and how singing is connected to the way that people understand race and gender. My writing has appeared in Hippo Reads, The Toast, the Oxford University Press Blog, American Music Review, and other publications. I’ve taught classes on music, gender, and writing for UCLA’s Musicology Department and Music Industry Program, and UCLA Extension’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
I’m currently the Assistant Dean for Faculty Development and Outreach in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). In this role, I serve as the chief communications officer for the FAS Dean’s Office and I oversee coaching and professional development programs for faculty members. Previously, I was the Program and Research Developer at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW). My book, Freedom Girls: Voicing Femininity in 1960s Pop, was recently published by Oxford University Press. In it, I explore how performers like Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Lulu, Sandie Shaw, Marianne Faithfull, Millie Small, P.P. Arnold and others used their singing voices to respond to and create new ideas about what it meant to be a young woman during the so-called “Swinging Sixties.” This project is based on deep dives into the archival record: I draw on teen magazines, the music press, oral histories, records and scripts from TV and radio, television footage, sound recordings, and more to reconstruct how the sounds of young women’s voices inspired new possibilities–and new anxieties–during a time of social change. In my spare time, I collect vintage cookbooks and I powerlift.