Caleb Labbe Phelan is a PhD student in Musicology at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. He earned his Bachelor of Music (2017) from the University of Toronto, and his Master of Music degree in Musicology from the University of Glasgow (2019). Broadly, his research examines the intersections between Romantic and early modern keyboard music, literature, and philosophy, with a particular focus on virtuosity, language, and translation. Caleb’s doctoral research specifically looks at Franz Liszt’s and Maurice Ravel’s virtuosic keyboard music, and this music’s demands for pianists to move beyond the physical limitations of the performing body, the technological limitations of the mechanism of the piano, and the textual limitations of the composer’s score. He is interested in the interplay between the pianist’s fidelity to the composer’s score, and the physical demands of transcendental virtuosity. Apart from his research, Caleb is an active pianist and maintains a studio of fifteen piano students. He also likes to play chess, paint, and watch movies in his free time.
Carolyne Sumner is a sixth-year PhD candidate in Musicology studying under the supervision of Dr. Robin Elliott. Carolyne’s doctoral research investigates the significance of musical networks in Canada during the postcentennial period and looks at the role played by cultural policymakers and gatekeepers in the outcomes of these networks. Using the Centennial celebrations as her starting point, her research considers how the cultural climate fostered during the period leading to 1967 impacted existing and developing networks by offering numerous collaborative, performance, publication, and recording opportunities. She examines how these circumstances transformed during the postcentennial period, and how changes made to cultural policy and the activities of cultural gatekeepers from 1968 onwards impacted the careers of Canadian composers and their ability to build thriving professional networks. Since the beginning of her academic career, Carolyne has presented her research at several graduate and professional conferences, and her work has been published in both Les Cahiers de la Société québécoise de recherche en musique (SQRM) and Intersections. Over the course of her studies, Carolyne’s research has also been generously supported by various provincial and federal academic awards, including the Ontario Graduate Student award and a SSHRC Doctoral fellowship award.
Emily MacCallum is a second-year PhD student in musicology. Her doctoral research explores the understanding of nineteenth-century orchestral music as indicative of historical soundscapes. More broadly, Emily’s research interests include programmatic music, sound studies, historical soundscapes, and sonic conceptions of landscape. In 2020, Emily completed an MA in Musicology from the University of Toronto and previously was awarded a Bachelor of Music (2017) from the University of Victoria. Outside of academic life, Emily is involved in her local outdoors club and plays violin in the Summerhill community symphony orchestra.
Joshua Tolulope David became a student in the PhD program in musicology at the University of Toronto in the fall of 2021. His research interests include but are not limited to performance practice, staging, and reception of canonical operas in Nigeria, and how they decentre European intellectual hegemony within a postcolonial framework. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Music (2016) and a Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology (2019) at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. His Master’s research focused on Naija hip-hop culture, a variant of the larger Afropop movement, as an attempt at the indigenization of hip-hop culture in Nigeria.
In addition to his research activity, Joshua has a Diploma in Vocal Performance from the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music (ABRSM) and has performed as a classical singer and conductor at the opera department of The Musical Society of Nigeria for several years.
Kolby Zinger-Harris is a PhD student in musicology at the University of Toronto, where their research is supervised by Dr. Ken McLeod. Kolby’s work is focused on the roles of musical production, policy, and discourse in mediating neoliberal, “regulatory queer” subjectivity. In that regard, their research is interdisciplinary, engaging with musicology, queer theory, and political economy. Kolby is particularly interested in the impacts of branding and entrepreneurialism on music and queer identity construction. Their master’s research, which was supported by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship, investigated RuPaul’s career as a normative queer brand by analyzing neoliberal narratives in popular discourses surrounding the drag queen celebrity. Kolby completed a Bachelor of Music specializing in composition at the University of Toronto, as well as a Master of Arts in musicology, also at U of T. Outside of academia, Kolby is an active composer, arranger, and producer, having recently arranged Isaiah Bell’s opera, The Book of My Shames, for chamber ensemble. This version was first performed by the Kelowna Opera Society in 2021 and is due to appear in several Canadian cities throughout 2022.
Laura McLaren is a PhD student in musicology at the University of Toronto. Her research interests are in popular music, spirituality, feminist theory, music video, and digital media. She completed her Master of Arts with Specialization in Women’s Studies at the University of Ottawa and completed her thesis “The Lyric Video as Genre: Definition, History, and Katy Perry’s Contribution” under the direction of Dr. Lori Burns. Her current doctoral research, supported by a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, explores how mainstream popular music has become more postsecular through the incorporation of religious and spiritual elements in the music and lyrics. She has presented her research at IASPM-CAN and contributed a chapter to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis (2019) edited by Lori Burns and Stan Hawkins, as well as a co-authored chapter in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Music Production (2020).
Rena Roussin is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in musicology in the Faculty of Music. Before arriving at UofT, Rena studied musicology at the University of Victoria (MA, 2018) and Acadia University (BA Hon, 2014). Her doctoral research, supported by a Canada Graduate Scholarship from SSHRC, examines interacting musical and textual constructions of disability and gender in Joseph Haydn’s late oratorios. More broadly, Rena’s research interests include conceiving of art music and music theatre as forms of activism in both historic and current contexts. As a Métis and settler woman with additional Haida ancestry, she also has a major interest in the ways art music in Canada interacts with the goals of Truth and Reconciliation. She serves on the curatorial board of Musicology Now, the Canadian Opera Company’s Indigenous Circle of Artists, and the Faculty of Music’s Anti-Racism and Anti-Oppression committee. Her publications appear in Haydn: The Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America, Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music, and the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook of Music and Art.
Sadie Menicanin is a PhD candidate in historical musicology and a Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow in the Humanities at the Jackman Humanities Institute for 2021–22. Broadly specializing in music and visual culture of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, her interests span Austro-German modernisms, sound studies, opera staging and dramaturgy, film music, urban history, and cultural geography. Her dissertation explores resonances between musical and urban gardens in early twentieth-century Vienna. Contextualizing staged gardens in works by Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Zemlinsky, and Franz Schreker, her research attends to musical and dramaturgical constructions of space in sung drama and illuminates the layered significance of gardens for this historical and artistic context. Her doctoral research has been supported by a Joseph Armand Bombardier CGS-Doctoral Fellowship (SSHRC) and a Jackman Junior Fellowship (Jackman Humanities Institute). Outside doctoral studies, Sadie is a lifelong choral singer. She is currently a member of Toronto’s Exultate Chamber Singers, where she also serves on the board of directors.
Tegan Niziol is a fifth-year PhD candidate in musicology at the University of Toronto. She earned her Bachelor of Music (2014) and Bachelor of Education (2015) degrees from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and her Master of Arts in Musicology degree from the University of Toronto (2017). Her current dissertation project re-examines the historiography of musical modernism, challenging the longstanding model for writing music history that privileges nation-based frameworks and trajectories of compositional “progress,” vis-à-vis the boundary-crossing musical career of Sergei Rachmaninoff. Complemented by her expertise in education, her research also considers the historical narratives that form the basis of undergraduate music history curricula, informing her classroom teaching practice. During her recently concluded five-year term as a graduate student library assistant at the University of Toronto Music Library, she contributed to various projects relating to the library’s extensive LP collection, the University of Toronto Faculty recordings, library research guides, and the creation of instructional videos.
Hannah M. Brown is a PhD student in musicology. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Queen’s University and a Master of Information and a Master of Arts in musicology from the University of Toronto. Hannah’s research examines various intersections between technology, labour, gender, and sexuality in electronic and computer music through theories and methodologies from feminist and queer technology studies. Her work also considers issues of the preservation and accessibility of electronic and early digital media. Her doctoral work focuses on the gendered and classed division of artistic and technical labour in electronic and early computer music in post-World War II Europe and argues that musical machines and software are artistic works in their own right, not merely tools for creating art. A portion of her MA research on Daphne Oram’s work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop will be published by the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology’s Reprising the Real World of Technology working group in their What Would Ursula Franklin Say? collection in 2021.
Matthew Shih is a PhD student in Musicology at the University of Toronto, where he is also completing a Collaborative Specialization in Jewish Studies. His research is broadly concerned with twentieth-century modernisms, and his interests include transnational migration, East-West cultural exchange, and the history of science and technology. Matthew has been particularly devoted to researching the musical lives of Austro-German Jewish refugees who escaped to Shanghai during the World War II era. His work has been generously supported by the Fulbright Program, the Jackman Humanities Institute, and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies.
Steven Hicks’s research explores the composition, transmission, and reception of music in late eighteenth-century English- and German-speaking Europe through an examination of print culture. Specifically, his dissertation places Joseph Haydn’s last oratorio with librettist Gottfried van Swieten, Die Jahreszeiten/The Seasons (1801), within a longer legacy of poetic, literary, and visual print culture during the Enlightenment. This dissertation will be the culminating step in completing a PhD in musicology and the collaborative program in book history and print culture at the University of Toronto. Prior to arriving at UofT, Steven trained as a classical guitarist and chorister. After earning a BA in music with a minor in English literature at Laurentian University, he completed an MA at Carleton University, writing a thesis on how contemporary media practices informed the work of Canadian pianist and composer, Glenn Gould. At UofT, Steven has frequently worked in collaboration with the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology, completed a printing apprenticeship at the Robertson Davies Library and Bibliography Room at Massey College, and undertaken numerous pedagogical courses and workshops through the TATP, Woodsworth College, and Centre for Community Partnerships.
Current MA Students
Charlotte Hausknost
Evangeline Stone-Barney
Isobel LeBlanc
Kevin Forfar
Nathan Friedman
Nolan Sprangers
Tegan Ridge
Vanessa Romao
William Thompson