Erika Supria Honisch grew up on the west coast of Canada and is currently completing her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of British Columbia, where she complemented her music-historical interests with studies in piano and harpsichord performance and was named a Wesbrook Fellow (2004). Her dissertation "Sacred Music in Prague, 1580-1612" investigates the role of sacred music and devotional culture in shaping confessional identity in the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, just prior to the Thirty Years War. Her graduate studies at the University of Chicago have also been supported by a Century Fellowship. A recent recipient of a University of Chicago Andrew Mellon Fellowship, she is an Affiliated Fellow of the Franke Institute for the Humanities there.

Holding Master of Science degrees in both physics and information science, Sumitra Ranganathan transitioned from a career as an e-commerce specialist in International Trade and Logistics to become a doctoral student at UC Berkeley in 2007. A student of north Indian classical music since 1989, she studies Dhrupad singing with Bettiah gharana musicians Falguni Mitra and Indra Kishore Mishra. Working with Dhrupad musicians from multiple schools, her dissertation will investigate the development of musical judgment and the politics of aesthetics in the constitution of contemporary Dhrupad as a genre, at the same time positing alternatives to the literacy and literalism characterized by Western notions of the classical in music. Her graduate work at UC Berkeley has been supported by a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellowship from the University of California and a Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowship from the U.S. Dept. of Education.

Ryan Bañagale's dissertation in progress for Harvard University studies the reception of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, an aspect of which is reflected in a 2009 article for the Journal of the Society for American Music. In 2007 he received the Hollace Anne Schafer Memorial Award from the New England chapter of the AMS, for Outstanding Student Paper. http://harvard.academia.edu/RyanBanagale

Valerie Dickerson is currently a Lecturer in Latin-American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth University, as well as a Visiting Instructor there in the African and African-American Studies Program. She had been a Thurgood Marshall Fellow at Dartmouth in 2008-09. She received her Ph.D. in 2009 from the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA with a dissertation entitled "Are Those Congas in the Pulpit?: Hymns, Alabanza y Adoración Music, and the Evangelical Subculture of Western Cuba."

Charles Carson completed his dissertation "Broad and Market: At the Crossroads of Race and Class in Philadelphia Jazz, 1956-1980" for the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and recently joined the music history faculty at the University of Delaware. His interests run from 20th-Century American music, particularly jazz, to popular music, film music, and music and tourism, with special interests in historiography and cultural studies. From 2002-06 he was a Shapiro Fellow and from 2001-06 a Fontaine Society Fellow, both at Penn. He has published in American Music and Ethnomusicology Forum (an essay called "'Whole New Worlds': Music and the Disney Theme Park Experience," 2004). In 2003 he presented a paper at the annual meeting of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology in Wales and in 2007 he delivered a paper at the national meeting of the AMS, Quebec City, called "'Sounds Middle Class': Smooth Jazz and the Black Middle Class." His article, "'Bridging the Gap': Creed Taylor, Grover Washington Jr., and the Crossover Roots of Smooth Jazz, appeared in the Black Music Research Journal (2008). Carson was entered in the Pi Kappa Lambda National Music Honor Society at his undergraduate institution, the University of Houston in 2001.

Sin-Yan Hedy Law received her PhD from the University of Chicago in June 2007 with a dissertation entitled "Gestural Rhetoric: In Search of Pantomime in the French Enlightenment, ca. 1750-1785." In 2006 she won an award for the best student paper of the AMS Midwest Chapter Meeting, and in 2006-07 she was a prestigious Mrs. Giles Whiting Fellow completing her dissertation at the University of Chicago. She is currently a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows and Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. Professor Law's articles will appear in the Cambridge Opera Journal, Notes, and Eighteenth-Century Music. She is at work on two book projects: Imitation and the Non-Verbal French Enlightenment, and Understood: The Soft Power of Understatement in Mixed-Media Chinese Music, 1997-2008.

Christina Sunardi specializes in the performing arts of Java, Indonesia. Her other interests include American musics, as well as dance, gender, and interaction. Sunardi has spent several years in Central Java and East Java studying and performing gamelan music and dance. She has also studied and performed music and dance with the San Francisco Bay Area ensembles Gamelan Sari Raras and Gamelan Sekar Jaya. An Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, Seattle since 2008, she completed her dissertation on East Javanese cross-gender dance and its music at the University of California, Berkeley.

Charles Hiroshi Garrett became an Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Michigan, School of Music, Theatre, and Dance in 2008, which also saw the publication of his book Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music in the Early Twentieth Century by the University of California Press. His research and teaching interests focus primarily on American music, jazz, popular music, music and racial/ethnic representation, and cultural theory. Prof. Garrett has received several prizes for his work, including an Alvin H. Johnson AMS-50 Award (2003) as well as the Mark Tucker Award and the Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award from the Society of American Music. He currently serves as editor-in-chief of The Grove Dictionary of American Music (second edition), which will be published by Oxford University Press as part of Grove Music Online and as a multi-volume print.

Mark Burford is Assistant Professor of Music at Reed College. In 2005, he received his Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Columbia University, where he wrote a dissertation on historical consciousness in nineteenth-century German musical culture, with a focus on Johannes Brahms. His work on European art music and African American vernacular music has appeared in 19th-Century Music, the Journal of Musicology, Notes, and in edited collections, and for three years he served as editor-in-chief of Current Musicology. He has served on the New York State Council on the Arts's Folk Arts Panel and on the National Endowment for the Arts's National Heritage Fellows Panel. Prior to his appointment at Reed, he was Manager of Secondary School and World Music Programs at The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall.

Georgiary Bledsoe writes in: "I am the founder and Executive Director of the Boston Urban Music Project (BUMP). Our mission is to fortify urban youth by helping them gain musical proficiency, cultural literacy and personal resilience through African diasporic music and mentoring. We will serve 150-200 youth during the 2007-08 school year in before- and after-school ensembles and classes in the Boston Public Schools. The work of BUMP is stimulating and gratifying, enriching young lives with musical legacies and recasting ethno/musicological scholarship for the consumption and instruction of urban youth." Before turning full-time to her current passion, Bledsoe (then McElveen) received her PhD at Duke University with a thesis called "'My hands, O God, I offer thee': Religious Social Consciousness and Cooperative Power in the Metropolitan St. Louis Gospel Music Center, 1930-1960" (2002). She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Brandeis University and held a one-year teaching appointment at Tufts University prior to starting BUMP. Between 2002-2006, she served on the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship Committee.

Maya Gibson wrote her dissertation "Alternate Takes: Billie Holiday at the Intersection of Black Cultural Studies and Historical Musicology" at the University of Wisconsin, Madison under the direction of Ron Radano. She is teaching at Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Completed in 2008, her thesis discusses Billie Holiday's recent reconfiguration in the field of black cultural studies, comparing that field's critical revisions of Holiday with her earlier historical and historiographic past. Using a variety of theoretical perspectives, Gibson's work situates Billie Holiday musicologically, focusing on pivotal musical, historical, and cultural sites of significance surrounding her. She closely examines Holiday's autobiography, discusses changes in Holiday's critical reception over time, places most of her recorded repertory into an historical context, and performs a song biography of one of her most controversial numbers, "My Man." Using a variety of theoretical perspectives, Gibson's work situates Billie Holiday musicologically, focusing on pivotal musical, historical, and cultural sites of significance surrounding her. In 2009, she presented "Billie Holiday's 'My Man' and the Crux of 'True' and 'New' Black Womanhood" at the 10th Feminist Theory and Music conference.

Bernardo Illari was the first recipient of an HMB fellowship. A specialist in Latin American music of the colonial and early national periods, he is Associate Professor of music at the College of Music, University of North Texas. He received his Ph.D. in Music History from the University of Chicago in 2001 with a dissertation entitled "Polychoral Culture: Cathedral Music in La Plata (Bolivia), 1680-1730." His HMB fellowship in 1995 was followed by an AHJ-AMS 50 fellowship in 1997. His books include La personalidad de Zipoli a la luz de su obra americana and Domenico Zipoli: Para una genealogía de la música clá sica latinoamericana, which was awarded the 2003 Premio de Musicología "Casa de las Américas." Among his other publications are an edited volume and over a dozen scholarly articles in Spanish, English, Italian, and Arabic published in the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Since 1992, he has been contributing scores, advice and notes to early music performers, including Ensemble Elyma, The Rare Fruit Council, Grupo Vocal Gregor, and Cuarteto Jacarandá, resulting in fifteen CDs of colonial music from Peru and Bolivia. He has edited the operas La púrpura de la rosa (Torrejón y Velasco, 1701) and San Ignacio de Loyola, and CDs of works by Zipoli and Juan de Araujo, poetic settings of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and a recreation of a colonial festival in Chuquisaca, Bolivia (Fiesta Criolla). Prior to teaching at UNT, Professor Illiari held appointments at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (Argentina) and the University of Hong Kong, and taught classes at the Universidad de Valladolid, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and the Conservatorio de Salamanca (Spain).