Kristi Brown-Montesano is a Lecturer in Musicology at UCLA and the author of Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas (University of California Press 2007; reissued in 2021). An active public musicologist, Brown-Montesano is also an affiliated scholar with the Los Angeles Opera and Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Phil Ford (Ph.D. University of Minnesota, 2003) is an associate professor of musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He is the author of Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture (Oxford University Press, 2013) and has published essays in Representations, Journal of Musicology, Musical Quarterly, and elsewhere. He was the founder and lead writer for the blog Dial ‘M’ for Musicology, which ran from 2006 to 2018, and nowadays co-hosts an arts and philosophy podcast, Weird Studies, with writer/filmmaker J. F. Martel. His current work concerns magical and contemplative styles of thought, feeling, and experience in various contexts, musical and otherwise.
James Porter is Professor Emeritus, UCLA and Honorary Professor, University of Aberdeen. He has published widely in the fields of ethnology and ethnomusicology and was a Founding Editor of the ten-volume Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (1997–2002) as well as Co-Editor of Vol. 8 (Europe). His latest book is Beyond Fingal’s Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2019; paperback 2022).
Douglas W. Shadle is an Associate Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University. An award-winning historian of American orchestras and orchestral music, he is the author of Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise (Oxford, 2016) and Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony (Oxford, 2021).
Reba Wissner is Assistant Professor of Musicology and coordinator of the Public Musicology Certificate at the Joyce and Henry Schwob School of Music at Columbus State University. She is the author of A Dimension of Sound: Music in The Twilight Zone (Pendragon Press, 2013), We Will Control All That You Hear: The Outer Limits and the Aural Imagination (Pendragon Press, 2016), and Music and the Atomic Bomb on American Television, 1950-1969 (Peter Lang, 2020).