Presentations

• "Music, Memory, and Trauma in El Salvador's Civil War Refugee Camps (1979-1992)" (Durham University Trauma Studies in the Medical Humanities Conference, 2018)
• "Trump's Playlist and Neoliberal Exceptionalism" (AMS, 2017)
• "Cold War Politics, American Exceptionalism, and an Eastman-Juilliard Rivalry," (The Juilliard School, 2017)
• "'Forbidden to Write a Melody': Leonard Bernstein's 'Kaddish' Symphony (1963) and the Cold War Style Wars" (SAM, 2017)
• "Americanist Nationalism in the Cold: The Case of Roy Harris" (AMS, 2015)
• "The Virtue of American Power and the Power of American Virtue: Exceptionalist Tropes in Early Cold War Musical Nationalism" (SAM, 2015) - awarded SAM's Cambridge University Press Award.
• "Cold War Cultural Diplomacy and the Changing Politics of Musical Style" (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2014)
• "Musical Style, Cold War Ideology, and the American-Soviet Composers' Exchange, 1958-60" (5th European Summer School on Cold War History, Trento, Italy, 2013)
• "Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in Moscow: Educational Television, Diplomacy, and the Politics of Tonal Music" (Canadian University Music Society Conference, 2012; East West Cultural Exchanges and the Cold War Conference, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, 2012; AMS 2012; University of Michigan Interdisciplinary Music Forum, 2012)
• "Musicians as Rhetorical Surrogates in Eisenhower's Cold War: Iceland, 1954-59: (SHAFR, 2012)
• "Cultural Diplomacy to Mitigate Cultural Imperialism: Music in US-Icelandic Relations, 1954-58" (SAM, 2011)
• "Ulysses Kay's Jubilee and the Politics of Race During the American Bicentennial" (AMS, 2010)
• “A Cold War Composer-Diplomat in the Civil Rights Era: The Case of Ulysses Kay” (SAM, 2010; UWO American Studies speaker series, 2010)
• “William Schuman and an ‘Epistemic Community’ of Cold War American Composers” (Cultural and International History IV, Cologne, 2009)
• “‘A Serious and Delicate Mission’: The Government-Funded European Tours of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, 1952-1968” ("Crosscurrents," 2009; UWO History Dept., 2009)
• “Composing Cultural Diplomacy—Globalizing American Music” (AMS Cold War Study Group, 2008)
• “Composer Activism, The State Department’s Music Advisory Panel, and the Cold War Construction of a Musical Identity for the United States” (SAM, 2008)
• “Aaron Copland and Cultural Diplomacy: ‘Un-American Composer Meets Cold War Ambassador” (ICMSN, 2007; AMS, 2007) - awarded AMS's Pisk Prize
• “Shaping a Musical Identity for the United States: Cold War Cultural Diplomacy and the State Department's Music Advisory Panel” (Harvard, 2007; UWO, 2007)
• “Cold War Copland: Television and Cultural Propaganda” (SAM, 2006)
• “Aaron Copland and the American Dream: The Story of a Little-Known Television Career” (City University of New York Music Grad Conference, 2005)

(AMS - American Musicological Society; SAM - Society for American Music; ICMSN - International Conference on Music Since 1900; UWO - University of Western Ontario; SHAFR - Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations)

I also give pre-concert talks and public lectures on 20th-century music topics.

A public lecture I gave in November 2011 in London, Ontario as part of Western University's "Classes without Quizzes" series on Music and the Cold War can be seen here.