Graduate Students
Composition
Maximiliano Amici
Student
I always enjoy composing, and I particularly like to explore diverse, multiple facets of music making, as mirrors of being and acting in the world. I was born in Rome in 1980 into a family of musicians. Apart from playing violin in my childhood, I started serious studies of music late in my life,... Full Profile »
James Budinich
Student
James Budinich composes music inspired by minimalism, Croatian folk traditions, and American popular music. He has written for orchestra, voice, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, and electronics. He has collaborated with Lindsay Brown (Love’s Lost Words for mezzo-soprano, cello, and piano),... Full Profile »
Stephen Downing
Student
Stephen Downing is a North Carolina-based composer, percussionist, and visual artist. His music searches to find the intersection of the classical tradition, organic structures, humor, and the human condition. Some of his musical inspirations include the obsessiveness of minimalism, the energy of... Full Profile »
Brooks Frederickson
Student
Composer Brooks Frederickson writes patient music that is grounded in long lines of slowly evolving textures with understated rhythmic drive. As an active participant in Brooklyn's vibrant contemporary music scene, he has worked with leading new music ensembles Sō Percussion, JACK Quartet,... Full Profile »
Brittany Green
Student
Brittany J. Green (b. 1991) is a North Carolina-based composer, creative, and educator. Described as “cinematic in the best sense” and “searing” (Chicago Classical Review), Brittany’s music is centered around facilitating collaborative, intimate musical spaces that ignite visceral responses. The... Full Profile »
Dayton Kinney
Student
Office Hours: by appointment only
Dayton Kinney creates music that has won and has been recognized for numerous competitions. Performed in the U.S. and abroad, Dayton’s music has had notable performances by the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Juventas New Music Ensemble, F-Plus, the Durham Medical Orchestra, Rela... Full Profile »
Huijuan Ling
Student
Huijuan Ling is a Chinese composer of contemporary concert music whose work has been heard across China, the US, Canada, and Italy, with major performance and commissions from the Shanghai Philharmonia Orchestra, CCM Philharmonia Orchestra, Seven Hills Sinfonietta, JACK Quartet, Line Upon Line... Full Profile »
Jason Mulligan
Student
Jason Mulligan is a composer seeking to explore how to blend the western classical tradition with the issues and sensibilities of 21st century life. A native of Dallas, Jason studied music composition at the University of Miami and Peabody Conservatory with Scott Stinson and Kevin Puts... Full Profile »
Minato Sakamoto
Student
Minato Sakamoto is a Japanese composer from Osaka. His compositions practice the unserious seriously, fuse spontaneous and organic qualities, and demonstrate a clear connection to the past. Minato is currently studying towards his Ph.D. in composition at Duke University. His current and past... Full Profile »
Amin Sharifi Jabali
Student
Sharifi’s works have been performed in the United States, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Russia, Canada, Poland, Czech Republic and his home Iran. His music was called “creative, individualistic, artistic” by the critique of Juilliard School of Music and “product of an unbridled... Full Profile »
Ethnomusicology
Cody Black
Student
Cody Black is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at Duke University. Interdisciplinarily trained in cultural anthropology and East Asian studies, he researches the intersection of sound, everyday life, and the (im)possibilit(y/ies) of the future in neoliberal South Korea. Drawing from long-term... Full Profile »
Jonathan Henderson
Student
Jonathan Henderson is a North Carolina-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, writer, producer, and educator. A PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Duke University, Jonathan's academic research concerns how local musical traditions are transformed through recording studio practice and come to... Full Profile »
Musicology
Devon Carter
Student
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Student in Musicology, 2019–PresentDevon Carter is a second-year Ph.D. student in musicology who studies the history of the voice. His current interests include the history and invention of the identification of the voice with the self, the historical and current... Full Profile »
Joanna Chang
Student
Ka Man Misty Choi
Student
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Student in Musicology, 2016–Present Formally trained as a linguist, I am currently working on projects that explore the relation between the musical, the linguistic, and the literary. My dissertation is to investigate the paths through which post-WWII Italian art music in... Full Profile »
Jon Churchill
Student
Jon's research focuses on British Modernism, especially the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, with special attention to the formal and rhetorical effects of musical discontinuity. Further research examines intertextuality in the music of Prince and the evolution of the British Grime genre in the age... Full Profile »
Meredith Graham
Student
Meredith is a sixth-year PhD candidate in musicology who studies twentieth-century British choral music. She is interested in text setting in the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, Grace Williams, and Elizabeth Maconchy. She is currently a Rubenstein Library Intern for Advertising... Full Profile »
Kinley Johnson
Student
Kinley Johnson is a first-year musicologist whose research focuses on music in film and television. Her current research interests include music in cinema after 1970; music, gender, and sexuality in film and media, especially in horror and Japanese animation; and the mass localization of anime in... Full Profile »
Hannah Krall
Student
Hannah Krall is a musicologist interested in early music and jazz improvisation, traditional jazz, and music for the viola da gamba. She has a BA in Music from Cornell University (magna cum laude).
Molly Martin
Student
Molly Eileen Martin is a first-year musicologist and a vocalist. Molly holds a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music, which she completed in May of 2019. There she studied improvisation under the composer and scholar Hankus Netsky, PhD., and voice with the... Full Profile »
Karen Messina
Student
Karen's research interests center on the analysis and interpretation of operatic and vocal music in an effort to determine how these genres express, support, and augment their texts. Her dissertation project, titled “Dramatic Impulse: Diegetic Music in the Operas of Giacomo Puccini,” delves into... Full Profile »
Maxwell Ramage
Student
BA in Music, Yale UniversityMM in Violin and Composition, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music
Harrison Russin
Student
Emily Shyr
Student
Emily Shyr entered the PhD program in Historical Musicology at Duke University in the Fall of 2018. Prior to coming to Duke, she earned her MPhil in American History at the University of Cambridge (2018), and received her Bachelor's degree from Columbia University (2017), where she majored in music... Full Profile »
Nicholas Smolenski
Student
Nicholas Smolenski, a fourth-year candidate and early modernist, studies varying intersections of sound, acoustics, liturgy, and the senses in seventeenth-century English culture. His dissertation explores how sonic and acoustical concerns profoundly affected the rebuilding and reception of St Paul... Full Profile »
Cole Swanson
Student
Cole Swanson is a musicologist interested in 20th-century opera, ecomusicology, and Cold War-era jazz, as well as the intersection of cinema, music/sound, and philosophy. He has an MA in Musicology from Tufts University and BAs from St.Olaf College in Music and Environmental Studies.