Kimberly Francis

Kimberly A. Francis is a feminist musicologist and Associate Professor of Music at the University of Guelph where she is also the Director of Interdisciplinary Studies for the College of Arts. All of her research focuses on the intersections between gender and cultural engagement with an eye toward championing equitable and inclusive practices in the field of musicology.

Francis’ work is currently supported by a five-year SSHRC Insight Grant, where she and co-PI Sofie Lachapelle are exploring ideas about French speech sounds as they developed in and were normalized through education, medicine, law, culture, entertainment, and phonetics from 1850-1914. Francis is also currently co-editing with Margot Irvine a series of collected essays on creative women’s reactions to the First World War, and her current monograph on French white women composers and the occult during the interwar years.

Kimberly Francis is the author of Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon (Oxford University Press, 2015), which was awarded an ASCAP-Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson award in 2016. She is the editor of Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence (Rochester University Press, 2018) and co-editor with Jeanice Brooks of Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music (Rochester University Press, 2020).

Francis has published articles in the Cambridge Opera Journal, 19th-Century Music, The Musical Quarterly, La Revue de Musicologie, Women and Music, the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Online Learning, and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy. Francis sits on the editorial board for Women and Music and is the Co-Editor-in-Chief for Grove Music Online’s special project to revise content related to Sexuality and Gender.

Alyssa Woods

Alyssa Woods is a popular music scholar specializing in issues of race, gender, and politics in hip-hop music and culture. Her research involves an interdisciplinary approach to music-analytic and socio-cultural analysis, focusing on the study of gender and race in popular music. Her recent publications have explored the concept of myth making, genealogy and succession in hip-hop, as well as pedagogical approaches to hip-hop in the music classroom. Currently, Dr. Woods is involved in an interdisciplinary project exploring the expression of religious themes, affiliation, and conversion in hip-hop.