STEPHANIE VANDER WEL
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR of MUSICOLOGY

Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles

206 Baird Hall
University at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY 14260

tel: (716) 645-2275
email: slv5@buffalo.edu

Stephanie Vander Wel completed her Ph.D. in musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008. Specializing in country music’s representations of class, race, and gender, her pedagogical strategies and research demonstrate the ways in which music, as a cultural practice, articulates notions of identity, aesthetics, and politics. In particular, she situates embodied performances and sonic details in socio-historic contexts. Her dissertation, entitled “’I’m a Honky-Tonk Girl: Country Music, Gender, and Migration” positions country music’s depictions of femininities within specific settings of migration to illuminate the complexity of both real experiences and cultural representations of gendered lives. Her work accounts for the differences that mark gender by blurring binaries of race (white/black) that have been mapped onto simplified class hierarchies (middle class/lower class).

Moreover, from her interests in women and culture, she has also presented conference papers about Nadia Boulanger’s compositional career and Meredith Monk’s musical and visual play of temporality, questioning the existence of a linear history and constructions of patriarchy. For Spring 2008, she taught a graduate seminar, “Gender and Twentieth-Century Music” and a class on The Beatles.

PUBLICATIONS

Review Essay of Proud To Be An Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration To Southern California by Peter La Chapelle in Southern California Quarterly (Winter 2007/2008).

Review Essay of Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class by Bill Malone in ECHO: a music-centered journal  (Spring 2002).

INVITED TALKS and CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

 “‘I’m A Honky-Tonk Girl”: The Musical Dialogues of Kitty Wells and Loretta Lynn,” presented at the Gender Institute at the University of Buffalo, SUNY, 2008.

 “‘I Wish I Was A Real Cowboy Girl’: The Girls of the Golden West and 1930s Gender Roles,” presented at The Society for American Music, San Antonio, Texas, 2008.

“‘Chewing Chawing Gum’:  Lulu Belle and the National Barn Dance” presented at The Society for American Music, Philadelphia, PA, 2007.

 “In the Guise of the Sweetheart: Patsy Montana, Gender, and Migration in Depression-Era California," presented at The Society for American Music, Eugene, Oregon, 2005.

 “A Feminist Spirituality: The Temporal Play and Poetic Language Of Meredith Monk’s ‘Visions of a Madwoman,’" presented at the Feminist Theory and Music VII, Bowling Green, Ohio, 2003.

“Performing Masculinity and Race:  Louis Armstrong, Hank Williams, and ‘Cold, Cold Heart,’” presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, “Looking Back, Looking Ahead,” Turku, Finland, 2001.

“‘Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’: Dialogism in Honky-Tonk,” presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music at “Toronto 2000: Musical Intersections,” Toronto, Canada, November 2000; and presented at the Tenth Annual Graduate Student Research Conference, “Thinking Gender,” University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 1999.

“Negotiations Between Pop and Country: Patsy Cline’s Embodied Performance of Gender and Class,” presented at The Society for American Music, Charleston, South Carolina, March, 2000; and presented at the Third Annual History Conference, “Sex, Gender, and Culture,” University of California, Irvine, CA , November 1999.

“Nadia Boulanger as Composer/Teacher,” presented at Feminist Theory and Music IV, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 1997; and presented at the meeting of the Capital Chapter of the American Musicological Society, Baltimore, MD 1997.