Jessica A. Schwartz

Jessica A. Schwartz received her Ph.D. in Music from New York University (2012). Assisted by an Andrew W. Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, her dissertation “Resonances of the Atomic Age: Hearing the Nuclear Legacy in the United States and the Marshall Islands, 1945–2010,” focuses on the sonic evidence of the US nuclear weapons testing program in the Marshall Islands that occurred between 1946 and 1958 and offers both a sonic history of the early American atomic age and a focused ethnomusicological study of Marshallese music.

She is preparing a book manuscript, tentatively entitled Composing “Free Association” Diaspora: Marshallese Music and the Geopolitics of Transnational Nuclear Decolonization, that takes material from the dissertation as a point of departure from which to delve into issues of postcolonial musical expression, gendered mobilities, and nuclear decolonization in the contemporary Marshallese diaspora. She has forthcoming publications in Women and Music, Music and Politics, the World of Music, New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, and the edited volumes, Music of War and Negotiating Territoriality: Spatial Dialogues between State and Tradition (coauthored with Peter Rudiak-Gould).

Her work is also featured in a collaborative article in the journal Royal Historical Society Transactions (senior author, Michael Beckerman). Moreover, she has presented at numerous national and international conferences such as the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Musicological Society, and the Crossroads International Cultural Studies Conference. She maintains active secondary research interests in, as well as composes and performs, experimental noise-based and punk music, the latter of which has resulted in a forthcoming encyclopedia entry on Green Day and a forthcoming revised entry on punk rock in global perspective that was commissioned by Grove Music Online. She is also the recipient of the AMS 50 Dissertation Completion Fellowship.