I am assistant professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and author of Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2025).

I research concert (or classical) music of the twentieth century, with a main focus on the politics of culture in eastern Europe. I also write and teach about topics such as trauma and memory studies, the history of music technology, musical nationalism, music and capitalism, and the music of Fryderyk Chopin. Committed to interdisciplinary inquiry, my work is in dialogue with cultural history, music analysis, Eastern European studies, and Holocaust and genocide studies.

My scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, the Polin Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, and the Beinecke Foundation. I have presented findings from my research at invited lectures on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as at multiple annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Abroad, I have been invited to speak by major Polish cultural and academic institutions, including the Union of Polish Composers, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Jewish Historical Institute, and the Chopin International Piano Competition.

My publications appear in the leading journals of the field. My article on Chopin and music diplomacy, published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, was awarded the Polish Studies Article prize by the British Association for Slavonic & East European Studies in 2023. In Holocaust and Genocide Studies, I wrote about the first known opera to commemorate the Holocaust, Tadeusz Zygfryd Kassern’s The Anointed (1951). Other articles, most focused on Polish and Polish-Jewish musical culture, appear in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies, The Journal of Musicology, 19th-Century Music, and Nadia Boulanger and Her World.

In addition, my research has led to collaborations with international scholarly communities and performers. A highlight of this work was the scholarship and performance festival “Forbidden Songs,” which featured six US premieres of works by Roman Palester and the (re)premiere of Poland’s first postwar feature film, Zakazane piosenki, with new English subtitles.

My interest in how music maps social change has led to research in fields including the history of technology, improvisation studies, and sound studies. I have written about how changing conceptions of amateurism provided a sounding board for Chopin and about how the advent of print capitalism restructured notions of improvisational creativity. I teach on a wide variety of subjects, including music and war, twentieth-century compositional techniques, and eastern European music history.

Before receiving my PhD from Cornell University, I studied at the Center for Polish Language and Culture at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków on a fellowship from the Kosciuszko Foundation and the Polish Ministry of Education. I hold a BA with Highest Honors from Swarthmore College, and I studied cello performance at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.