Faculty Research and Teaching Interests
Travis Stimeling
I’m an ethnomusicologist who conducts research on commercial country music and Appalachian music and culture. One of the things I love most about my research is the opportunity to meet creative musicians and learn about the ways that they think about music. Currently, I’m working on a book examining the changes that the country music industry underwent during the 1980s, a decade that found Nashville becoming increasingly tied to the global media marketplace.
As an instructor, I love to teach courses that cross generic and cultural boundaries and that force students to think about familiar music in unfamiliar ways. Since I’ve been on the WVU faculty, I’ve taught courses in jazz history, 20th- and 21st-century music, reception history, and recording practices, among many others. [Faculty Profile]
Michael B. Vercelli
I'm the director of Graduate Studies in Music and the director of the WVU World Music Performance Center. My primary teaching responsibilities include a wide variety of world music ensembles and courses on the music of Africa and the African Diaspora. My ensembles encourage students to investigate the performance traditions of other cultures by emphasizing musical forms, concepts, cultural contexts, instrument construction and techniques, and multiple processes of learning.
My research on Ghanaian xylophone traditions, specifically the gyil, focuses on the performance practice and pedagogy of African music, oral tradition, musical communication, collaborative research with non-western culture-bearers, and sustaining intangible cultural heritage. As an advocate for global learning, I am committed to bringing international musicians to campus and have lead study abroad programs to Ghana, Brazil, and Belize. [Faculty Profile]
Jennifer Walker
I’m a musicologist whose research focuses on the intersections of music, politics, and religion. Specifically, I focus on the creation and expression of the sacred in secular contexts, particularly in nineteenth-century France. What interests me the most about my research are the various and complex ways that secular societies use cultural products to express beliefs that are fundamentally religious. My book Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transformations of Catholicism in the Music of Third-Republic Paris, was published in 2021, and I am working on a new project, focused on Berlioz’s Requiem, that explores sacred sounds through an architectural lens.
My interdisciplinary research often informs my teaching. I deeply enjoy teaching students to approach music history through various approaches, whether those be based in political, religious, sociological, or other such approaches and, as an instructor, I aim to help my students develop critical listening skills so that they are better equipped to be intellectually engaged citizens who actively and critically participate in the world around them. [Faculty Profile]
Katelyn Best
I’m an ethnomusicologist whose research explores music in Deaf culture. Broadly my work focuses on musical movements and cultural activism. More specifically, my research traces the development of dip hop (deaf hip hop) and examines socio-cultural mechanisms that have historically colonized deaf experiences of music. This research has led me to examine ways that music recording, production, and consumption within popular music have traditionally fostered a hearing-centric reality of music. What I love most about this area of research is being able to meet with artists and share their ongoing efforts to remove barriers within the music industry and break through stereotypes of music and deafness. I’m currently co-editing an anthology titled “At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice,” which highlights sites, critical perspectives, and methods that work to uncover overlooked mechanisms of power through the lens of music.
As a teacher, I focus on exploring music from a multitude of perspectives to foster an open learning environment. I ask students to examine their own understanding of music and analyze factors that contribute to this. Within the classes I teach, I work to support a wide range of learning styles and cover course information in accessible and inclusive ways. I love collecting instruments and bring them into the classroom as much as possible to provide hands on experiences when studying specific musical traditions. I believe that some of the most fundamental values of education lie in its ability to provide an environment that gives a person the opportunity to acquire new experiences, explore new perspectives from which to view these experiences, and ultimately grow as both a scholar and an individual. [Faculty Profile]
