Category: Activities

In addition to classroom teaching, I have worked as an Instructional Technology Fellow at Macaulay Honors College for the past three years, helping faculty integrate digital pedagogy and assignments into their curricula while assisting students with digital humanities projects. I have been paired with faculty in Macaulay’s interdisciplinary core courses to design, build, and maintain websites throughout the semester on Macaulay’s ePortfolios WordPress learning management system, and to help create innovative assignments that utilize this technology. Additionally, I work with Macaulay students to guide them in technology best practices and assist them with using digital tools to enhance their learning and presentation of knowledge.

I have used this model in designing my own course websites, including this site for a 50-person music appreciation course. As an example of assignments using this platform, students create a blog post responding to questions about Beethoven and deafness that challenge them to question traditional “triumph” narratives surrounding disability.

Examples of some Macaulay assignments I have helped design and facilitate using the ePortfolios platform include:

• An Instagram street photography project (assignment description here) where students completed readings about street photography before taking pictures themselves, eventually curating an gallery of student-generated content
• A student-created website exploring the full production cycle of New York City Halal Carts within the context of immigration law, policy, and immigrant life
• Scientific posters created by students describing an original 3D-printed Healthcare Innovation invention
• A student-created website offering policy solutions to New York City Housing Authority issues
• Tutorials for an interdisciplinary science course on Avoiding Plagiarism and Introduction to Scientific Research

Essays in an edited volume:

• “Nomadic Musical Audiences: A Historical Precedent for the Grateful Dead.” In Reading the Grateful Dead: A Critical Survey, edited by Nicholas G. Meriwether, 237–246. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012.

Encyclopedia and dictionary entries:

• “Allman Brothers Band”; “Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin”; “Grateful Dead.” In The 100 Greatest Bands of All Time, edited by David V. Moskowitz. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC–CLIO/Greenwood Press, 2015.
• “Jam Band”; “Love”; “Phish”; “Psychedelic Rock.” In The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition, edited by Charles Hiroshi Garrett. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Book reviews:

• Review of Very Good for an American: Essays on Edward MacDowell, ed. E. Douglas Bomberger. American Music, forthcoming.
• Review of Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature, ed. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe. Notes 74, no. 1 (September 2017): 83–86.
• Review of Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel, by Stephen Budiansky. Notes 72, no. 2 (December 2015): 351–53.
• Review of George Whitefield Chadwick: The Life and Music of the Pride of New England, by Bill F. Faucett. Bulletin of the Society for American Music 41, no. 2 (Spring 2015).
• Review of Grateful Dead and the Art of Rock Improvisation, by David Malvinni. Notes 71, no. 3 (March 2015): 486–489.
• Review of Peter Gabriel, From Genesis to Growing Up, edited by Michael Drewett, Sarah Hill, and Kimi Kärki. Notes 68, no. 4 (June 2012): 765–767.

Courses Taught:

(all courses taught as the instructor of record)

General education

• Music Appreciation, including both American popular and Western classical music (Rutgers-Newark)
• Music Appreciation, exclusively Western classical music (Baruch College, University of Washington)

Undergraduate music majors

• Core music history survey, antiquity through 1750 (Baruch College)
• Core music history survey, twentieth/twenty-first century (Queens College)
• American popular music survey (Baruch College)
• Writing About Music (University of Washington)

Graduate level

• Special Topics in Music History seminar: American Classical Music 1850–1950 (Lehman College)

Invited Talks

• The MacDowell Colony and the Myth of Rural Solitude – Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ; University of Texas, Austin, TX, November 2018
• Roundtable: Teaching History, Teaching Crisis – Pedagogy in the Environmental Humanities Symposium, Columbia University, New York, NY, April 2016
• Performing Race, Place, and Hybridity in the Music of the Talking Heads – Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn, NY, April 2015

Select Conference Presentations

• Poster: Affective Music Theory and Musical Exploration: Michael Hamad’s @phishmaps – Society for American Music (SAM), Montreal, Canada, March 2017
• Dancing in the Barn with Charles Ives – American Musicological Society (AMS), Vancouver, BC, November 2016
• Assessing a Writing Across the Curriculum Collaboration – CUNY Coordinated Undergraduate Education Conference, Bronx, NY, May 2016
• “Real Vermonters”: Dorothy Canfield Fisher and the New England Identity of Carl Ruggles – SAM, Boston, MA, March 2016
• “All the Years Combine”: Issues of Historiography in the Periodization of the Grateful Dead – Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPCA), Albuquerque, NM, February 2016
• Performing Race, Place, and Hybridity in the Music of the Talking Heads – SAM, Sacramento, CA, March 2015; International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), Gijón, Spain, June 2013
• “The Formerly Quiet Corner is Full of Bustle and Business”: Symphony Hall and the Changing Cultural Geography of Fin-de-siècle Boston – Nineteenth Century Studies Association, Boston, MA, March 2015
• Embodied Environmentalism in John Luther Adams’s Become Ocean – Ecomusics and Ecomusicologies 2014: Dialogues, Asheville, NC, October 2014
• “Symphonic Dignity,” Geography, and the Reception of George Chadwick’s Symphony No. 2 – SAM, Little Rock, AR, March 2013
• Carl Ruggles, Walt Whitman, and the Gendered Place of Men and Mountains – Ecomusicologies 2012 conference, New Orleans, LA, October 2012; Graduate Students in Music conference, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY, April 2012
• Harmonic and Geographic Ambiguity in the Grateful Dead’s “Terrapin Station” – IASPM-Canada, Montreal, QC, June 2011
• IT and the X Factor: Improvisational Strategies and Tendencies of Phish and the Grateful Dead – Popular Culture/American Culture Association national conference, San Antonio, TX, April 2011
• Phish and the Grateful Dead: What a Long, Uncomfortable Relationship It’s Been – SWPCA, Albuquerque, NM, February 2010
• Between Two Worlds: Aaron Copland and the Musical Place of Vitebsk – UCLA ECHO conference: “Space, Time and Music,” Los Angeles, CA, May 2008; AMS Pacific Northwest Chapter, Vancouver, BC, April 2008
• Nomadic Musical Audiences: A Historical Precedent for the Grateful Dead – SWPCA, Albuquerque, NM, February 2007

I served as a Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) fellow for three years at the New York City College of Technology (NYCCT), serving as Senior WAC Fellow for the final two years of my appointment. Working with faculty in both one-on-one partnerships and in workshop settings, I helped strategize and implement best practices and assignment design to integrate writing into curricula. At NYCCT, I worked mainly with professors from outside the humanities, including professors in mathematics and chemical engineering departments, to revise student assignments to incorporate writing. Strategies included scaffolding, designing rubrics, informal/exploratory writing, and notetaking.

I also helped design and then led faculty workshops on topics. Below are a sampling of topics, with links to PowerPoints:

• Writing Assignment Design
• Effective Grading and Minimal Marking
• Reducing Plagiarism
• How to Create a Writing Intensive Syllabus
• The Creative Classroom – a workshop on using non-traditional assessments and activities

As part of the WAC Fellowship program, I received annual training in WAC best practices and participated in regular professional development workshops with other WAC fellows and program directors.