Duke Music is excited to welcome (l to r) Lacie Eades, Ethan Foote, Faye Ma, and Chris Williams.
Lacie: I am a first-year Ph.D. student in musicology. My research focuses on the reception of Giovanni Rovetta’s music throughout Europe in the seventeenth century. Prior to coming to Duke, I completed a Master’s degree in musicology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, a Master of Education with an emphasis in teaching and technology from William Woods University, and a Bachelor of Music Education with an emphasis in voice and piano from Southeast Missouri State University. I taught for over a decade in the Missouri public school system, and it was this time in the classroom that prompted my interest in pursuing musicological studies. Outside of academic work, I enjoy spending time with my husband Patrick and our two teenage sons, Bennett and Justin. We like playing tennis, playing board games, and going to concerts together. Jack White and Punch Brothers have been a few of our favorite shows!
Ethan: I am a composer and musician from Washington, D.C. Having come up as a bassist in my hometown's vibrant jazz scene, I later ventured into songwriting, arranging, theatre, and concert music, developing a multidimensional creative practice as a performer-composer that has also been shaped by literature, philosophy, and religion. I received a BA in English from Oberlin College in 2010 and an MFA in Music Composition from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2020. I enjoy being out in nature, reading, and telling people I went to Oberlin but not for music.
Faye: I am a first-year Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology with interests in Sinophone, postcolonial, diaspora, and Asian/Asian American Studies; music and performance in transnational and global China; and religion and vernacular and performative practices. I am also currently thinking about ethnomusicological education and neoliberal multiculturalism in American higher education; the disjuncture between area studies and ethnic studies (and its manifestation in music studies); "world music" and global racial capitalism in its emerging markets; and spectating the launching and landing of spacecrafts as a staged performance and religious experience in different nationalisms. I previously earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College, where I studied Asian Studies, Music, and Religion. When I am not in class or reading, you can catch me biking around the city, watching bento box prep videos, bullet journaling (intensively and excessively, as a legacy of the pandemic), or going down the rabbit hole of 1990s Hong Kong star culture (again, another legacy of the pandemic).
Chris: I am a composer and having deferred my Ph.D. for a year am thrilled to finally be in Durham. I am Australian but have been living and working in London for the past 4 years, at the central music library of the BBC, while also working as a freelance composer in the theatre and concert hall. My undergraduate degree in composition was at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and I completed a Master’s in composition at the University of Oxford in the U.K.. Interestingly, I actually grew up - for a short time - in the U.S.A. My father undertook a sabbatical at the Mayo Clinic when I was very young, so my earliest memories are of Minnesota snow - by contrast, the North Carolinian humidity has been quite the surprise!
