About Me

I am the former Dean of Arts and Pickard-Bell Chair in Music at Mount Allison University.  I earned my Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Toronto with a concentration in History and Literature of Music. Follwing this, I pursued a career in public broadcasting, working as a music programmer and producer of a classical music programs for CJRT-FM in Toronto. In 1993, I entered the graduate program in musicology at the Eastman School of Music. My dissertation, entitled West Side Story(s): Perspectives on a Great American Musical, was supported by the three dissertation fellowships, including the AMS-50 Dissertation Fellowship awarded annually to the most promising doctoral research in musicology in North America. In 2011 my first book  was published by Scarecrow Press, and won the Music in American Culture award of the American Musicological Society.

I have presented papers on musicology and music history pedagogy at national and international conferences, including meetings of Feminist Theory and Music, the American Musicological Society and the International Musicological Society. In addition, I have given guest lectures and has been an invited speaker on musical theatre, most notably at Harvard University. I twice won the “Best Student Paper” from the New York State/St. Lawrence Chapter of the AMS. My work has been published in Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and Studies in Musical Theatre.

Before coming to Mount Allison, I taught music history at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, the State University of New York at Geneseo, and the Eastman School of Music. In 2008 I won the Tucker Teaching Award, Mount Allison’s highest recognition of teaching excellence, and the Association of Atlantic Universities’ Distinguished Teacher Award. I was named a 3M National Teaching Fellow in 2010.

My research interests include music history pedagogy, British musical theatre of the 1950s, and American musical theatre at mid-century. I have developed innovative courses including one on the Beatles and a course supported by the Vice-President’s Curricular Innovation fund entitled “Music and Difference,” which addresses music’s role in mediating and expressing difference. I have also taught a course on pedagogy and fundamentals of teaching for undergraduates.