2025 Executive Board Election

Stephen Rodgers (Ph.D., Music Theory, Yale University, 2005; B.A., Music and English, Lawrence University, 1998) is the Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music, Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship, and Department Head of Academic Music at the University of Oregon, where he has been teaching since 2005. His research focuses on the relationship between music and text in songs from the 19th century to the present day, especially songs by underrepresented composers. His book The Songs of Clara Schumann (Music in Context series, Cambridge University Press) was published in 2023, and his edited collection The Songs of Fanny Hensel (Oxford University Press, 2021) won an Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award from the SMT in 2024. He has also published a monograph about Hector Berlioz (Form, Program, and Metaphor in the Music of Berlioz, Cambridge University Press, 2009). His publications have appeared in journals such as Music Theory Spectrum, Music Theory Online, SMT-V, SMT-Pod, Music Analysis, Music Theory and Analysis, and the Journal of Musicological Research, as well as in many edited collections. Rodgers’s work is guided by a desire to reach communities that extend beyond academia. He is a founding member of the Women’s Song Forum, an online forum devoted to women’s voices in song and geared toward a broad audience. He also hosts a website devoted to marginalized composers called Art Song Augmented and a podcast about poetry and song called Resounding Verse. Rodgers has served the SMT in a variety of roles—as chair of the Program Committee and moderator of the plenary session on public music theory (2023), as Associate Editor of Music Theory Online (2014–2017), and as a member of Music Theory Spectrum’s editorial board (2018–2021).

Cara Stroud, she/her, (Ph.D., Music Theory, Florida State University, 2016; M.M. and B.M. Music Theory, University of North Texas, 2012 and 2009) is an Associate Professor of Music Theory at Michigan State University, where she has been teaching since 2016. She previously held teaching positions at Oklahoma State University, Florida State University, and University of North Texas. Her research interests focus on issues of form and musical meaning in recent music, including narrativity, intertextuality, the tarantella topic, nostalgia, form in Top-40 pop music, and revising the music theory curriculum. Her articles and reviews have appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, Engaging Students: Essays in Music Theory Pedagogy, and Music Theory Online. Her publications also appear in the edited collections Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles (Sly and Callahan, eds., Routledge, 2020), and Black Composers in the Music Theory Classroom (Hoag, ed., Routledge, 2023). She enthusiastically presents papers at meetings of the SMT and of international and regional societies, and works closely with her students at MSU pursuing the same. She has served SMT as a member of the Publication Awards Committee (2023–2024) and as an Editorial Assistant for MTO (2014–2015). She is currently a member of the Editorial Board for Theory and Practice (2023–2026), and has served on the Editorial Board for SMT-V (2019–2022). For Music Theory Midwest, she has also served as a member of the Program Committee (2025–2026), on the Executive Board (2021–2023), on the Nominations Committee (2019), and as a member of the Komar Committee (2018 and 2023).

Clifton Boyd (Ph.D., Music Theory, Yale University, 2022; M.M., Music Theory, Indiana University, 2016; B.M., Viola Performance and Music Theory, University of Michigan, 2014) is an Assistant Professor of Music at New York University, where he has taught since 2022. His research explores themes of racial identity (particularly Blackness), politics, and social justice in American (and, more recently, Italian) popular music. He is currently completing his first monograph, Racial Dissonance: American Barbershop Harmony in the Age of Jim Crow. His publications appear or are forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory and Analysis, Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, Theory and Practice, American Music, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as the edited collections The Oxford Handbook for Public Music Theory and Being Black in the Ivory: Truth-Telling about Racism in Higher Education (University of North Carolina Press, 2024). His research has been supported by the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has served the SMT as a member of the SMT-40 Dissertation Fellowship Committee (2022–24; chair, 2023–24) and the Committee on Race and Ethnicity (2017–20); and as a mentor for the CV and Cover Letter Review Session (2024) and FIGE’s Proposal Mentoring Program (2021). For the AMS, he has served on the Eileen Southern Travel Fund Committee (2021–23) and currently serves as a Member-at-Large (2023–26). He has also served in various capacities for MTSNYS, the Society for American Music, and the Engaged Music Theory Working Group. He serves on the editorial boards of Music Theory Online (2024–27), College Music Symposium (2022–25), and Black Music, in Theory (2025–28). He is founder of the graduate student–led coalition Project Spectrum (2017–22; affiliate board member, 2022–present).

Jenine Brown (Ph.D. and M.A., Music Theory, Eastman School of Music, 2014 and 2006; B.A. Economics and B.M. Music Theory, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, 2003) is an Associate Professor of Music Theory and Coordinator of Ear Training at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University, where she has taught since 2015. Her research is broadly concerned with exploring listener expectation using empirical methodologies, and she has published on a wide variety of topics such as the pre-dominant harmonic function, post-tonal music, cover songs, and aural skills pedagogy. This work has appeared in Music Theory Spectrum, Music Perception, Empirical Musicology Review, Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, SMT-Pod, Journal of New Music Research, Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy, College Music Symposium, The Routledge Companion to Aural Training in Music Education, and elsewhere. She has presented at meetings of the Society for Music Theory, the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, American Musicological Society, Music Theory Midwest, and the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic, among others. Brown has served the Society for Music Theory as Associate Editor of Music Theory Online (2021–23) and as Statistician (2017–19). She has also been a member of SMT’s Nominations Committee (2024), Program Committee for the annual conference (2020), Demographics and Diversity Task Force (2018), and Professional Development Committee (2012–14, student member). She is very active in the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic, recently serving as President (2022–24), Secretary (2018–22), Local Arrangements Chair (2023), and Program Chair (2019). She has been involved with the College Board’s AP Music Theory exam annually as a reader and leader since 2011. She is also a current member of the AP Music Theory Test Development Committee.

Philip Duker (Ph.D., Music Theory, University of Michigan, 2008; Médaille d’Or, Premier Prix de Percussion, Conservatoire National de France de la Région Rueil-Malmaison, 2004; B.A., Philosophy and Music with a concentration in Percussion, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 2000) is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Delaware where he has been teaching since 2009. At UD, he is Director of the Institute for Transforming University Education, which focuses on Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and engaged pedagogy. His research interests include: pedagogy (music theory and more broadly), artificial intelligence, music perception, analytical systems, and repetition in Twentieth-Century music. He has published articles and book chapters in venues such as: Perspectives of New Music, The Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, Music Theory Online, GAMUT, and the Routledge Companions to Music Theory Pedagogy and Aural Skills Pedagogy. He is the recipient, with Patricia Burt of the SMT’s 2024 Pedagogy of Music Theory Award for their 2022 JMTP article: “Student-Driven Music Theory: How the Question Formulation Technique Can Promote Agency, Engagement, and Curiosity.” He served as the lead editor and organizer for Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy from 2014–2022, including volume 8 (2020) which won the “2023 Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award” from the Society for Music Theory. He has served the SMT as the Sustainability Coordinator from 2014–2016 as well as on the various iterations of the Sustainability Committee. He was awarded the “2021 SMT Volunteer of the Year Award” for his work on the IT/Networking committee (member, 2020; chair, 2021–2023). In that role he also had the privilege of working with Jennifer Diaz, Jennifer Iverson, and Andrew Gades to make the SMT’s meetings (2021–2023) more accessible through video recording/hosting and live-streaming sessions. In the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic, he has served on the Program Committee (2025) as well as in the following roles: Member-at-Large (2010–2014), Secretary (2014–2016), and President (2016–2018).

Julianne Grasso (Ph.D., Music History and Theory, University of Chicago, 2020; B.A. summa cum laude, Music with a certificate in Neuroscience, Princeton University, 2010) is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Florida State University, where she has taught since 2022. Her previous position was at the University of Texas at Austin as the Grace Hill Milam Centennial Fellow in the Fine Arts (2020–22). Her research interests include music in screen media, especially video games, and music theory in the public imagination. Her published work within the last year appears in Music Theory Spectrum, Music and the Moving Image, The Journal of Sound and Music in Games and in The Oxford Handbook of Video Game Music and Sound (eds. Gibbons and Grimshaw-Aagaard). She has presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, Music and the Moving Image, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, among others, and gave the keynote address at the 2023 meeting of The South Central Society for Music Theory. Her research and teaching have been supported by grants from the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago and the Center for American Music at the University of Texas at Austin. She has previously served SMT as a member of the Committee on Race and Ethnicity (2020–22), and as chair of the Film and Multimedia Interest Group (2020–22), serving for the latter on the publication award committee in 2023. Outside of SMT, she is a member of the steering committee for the North American Conference on Video Game Music, and serves on the editorial board for Music Theory Online.