The independent study project at Wooster requires each senior to complete a mentored research project that showcases the work that they have completed in their time at the College. My research project, advised by professor of English and Global Media and Digital Studies Jennifer Hayward, is a joint I.S. within my two major programs.

My project, titled "Courtesy of the Red, White And Blue: The Populist Songs of Modern American Through Presidential Campaign Music," is a multimedia analysis into how presidential campaigns utilize music on the campaign trail. You can view the website portion of my project above.

This Independent Study analyzes the way that music has been used in United States presidential campaigns in the twenty-first century. Within my research – which is encapsulated by a written portion, data analysis, and website – I aim to unpack three key election years and understand how each of the party-endorsed candidates use music in their campaigns for office, while also creating a new database for presidential campaign music. I apply close-reading concepts while analyzing candidates under a populist lens. The data analysis portion of this Independent Study comprised of watching and logging over 2,000 videos on C- SPAN of the 2000, 2008, and 2016 Elections and logging instances of music. With this data, I created three maps in ArcGIS that reflected each presidential campaign year and noted genre differences, which can be viewed at my website above. In my conclusion, I argue that emerging technologies will only further shape how we interact with music and use it to leverage positions of power.