Travis D. Stimeling, Assistant Professor of Music History, West Virginia University School of Music

Travis D. Stimeling is an Assistant Professor of music history at West Virginia University. He has published two previous books with Oxford University Press: Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene (2011; paperback ed., 2016) and The Country Music Reader (2014). He served as a Senior Editor for The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd Edition.

Erika Brady spent more than a decade working with ethnographic cylinder recordings at the Library of Congress, and was the principal preservation specialist for the Federal Cylinder Project. Educated in folk studies at Harvard / Radcliffe, UCLA, and Indiana University, she has a longstanding research interest in vernacular music of North America. In 2006, she organized the first academic conference devoted to bluegrass music, held at Western Kentucky University. She has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Folk Studies and Anthropology at WKU since 1989.

Leigh H. Edwards is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University. She is the author of Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity (Indiana University Press, 2009), The Triumph of Reality TV: The Revolution in American Television (Praeger, 2013), and Dolly Parton and Gender Performance in Popular Music (forthcoming, Indiana University Press).

Pamela Fox is Professor of English at Georgetown University. She is the author of Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1945; Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music; and the co-editor of Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music (with Barbara Ching).

Nathan D. Gibson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University and a performing musician. His monograph, The Starday Story: The House That Country Music Built (University Press of Mississippi, 2011), received the 2012 Belmont Award for Best Book on Country Music.

Caroline Gnagy is an independent scholar based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of Texas Jailhouse Music: A Prison Band History(The History Press, 2016). Other works appear in Country Boys & Redneck Women, (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) and The Handbook of Texas Music, 2nd ed. (Texas State Historical Association Press, 2012).

Patrick Huber is a professor of history at Missouri University of Science and Technology and the author or editor of six books, including the award-winning Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (2008) and The Hank Williams Reader (2014). His most recent book is The A&Rchitects of American Roots Music: The Record Producers Who Created Hillbilly and Race Music.

Charles L. Hughes is the Director of the Memphis Center at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. His acclaimed first book, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South, was released by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015.

Tracey E.W. Laird is professor of music at Agnes Scott College. She is the author or editor of four books, including most recently Austin City Limits: A History (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Austin City Limits: A Monument to Music (Insight Editions, 2015), the latter co-authored with her spouse.

Richard Lloyd is Associate Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City. Lloyd has published work on Southern cities, urban design, globalization and conservative politics. He is working on a book about Nashville and the urban geography of musical production.

Olivia Carter Mather is a scholar of American popular music specializing in rock, country, and folk. Her work examines stylistic hybridity and identity. She has published on the Eagles, Gram Parsons, and producer Daniel Lanois. She lives in Long Beach, CA.

Music journalist and critic Barry Mazor is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and the author of Meeting Jimmie Rodgers (2009), and Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music (Chicago Review Press, 2015). He holds an MFA from the NYU Graduate Film Institute.

Kristine M. McCusker holds a Ph.D. in History, Ethnomusicology and Folklore from Indiana University and has written or co-edited three books and multiple articles on history, gender and country music. With the assistance of a grant from the National Institutes of Health, she is currently writing a book on Southern death rituals in the early twentieth century.

Jason Mellard is Assistant Director of the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University in San Marcos. He is the author of Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture and co-editor of The Journal of Texas Music History.

Tim Sterner Miller is a senior lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he teaches courses on popular, world, and art musics, and directs the UWM Collegium Musicum. His research focuses on instruments as technologies and the role of individual players and player communities within broader social and musical contexts.

Clifford R. Murphy is an ethnomusicologist, folklorist, and the Director of Folk & Traditional Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts. From 2008-2015, Murphy directed the Maryland state folklife program-Maryland Traditions-at the Maryland State Arts Council. He received a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Brown University in 2008. Raised in New Hampshire, Murphy was a singer, guitarist, and songwriter for the alternative country band Say ZuZu and the honky-tonk band Hog Mawl. He is the author of Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England (2014), and-with Henry Glassie and Douglas Dowling Peach-the co-author of Ola Belle Reed and Southern Mountain Music on the Mason-Dixon Line (2015).


Jocelyn R. Neal is professor of music and adjunct professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of The Songs of Jimmie Rodgers: A Legacy in Country Music (Indiana University Press) and Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History (Oxford University Press).

Diane Pecknold is an Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Louisville. She has written and edited a number of books on country music, including The Selling Sound (2007); Hidden in the Mix (2013); and, with Kristine M. McCusker, A Boy Named Sue (2004) and Country Boys and Redneck Women (2016).

Greg Reish is Director of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University. A scholar and performer of old-time and bluegrass styles, Reish has released an album with fiddler Matt Brown, and recently co-produced Spring Fed Records' Home Made Sugar and a Puncheon Floor, a collection of home recordings by John Hartford and Howdy Forrester.

Stephen Shearon is professor of musicology at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches a wide range of music topics. His current research interest is the worldwide gospel music phenomenon, particularly the growth of gospel song production, music publishing, and shape-notation music education in the American South.

Travis D. Stimeling is an assistant professor of music history at West Virginia University. He has published two books with Oxford University Press: Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene (2011) and The Country Music Reader (2014) and served as a Senior Editor for The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd Edition.


Stephanie Vander Wel is Associate Professor of Historical Musicology at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Her research interests focus on vocality and the embodied performances of gender, class, and region in country music. Her book, The Singing Voices of Hillbilly Maidens and Cowboys' Sweethearts: Country Music and the Gendering of Class, 1930s-1950s, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.

Jada Watson holds a PhD in musicology from Université Laval. Her research focuses on geography and country music, with specific interest in issues of genre, gender, identity, environment and geo-cultural traditions. She teaches research methods in music at the University of Ottawa, where she is also the Undergraduate Research Coordinator.

Eric Weisbard is Associate Professor of American Studies at University of Alabama, longtime organizer of the EMP Pop Conference, and author of Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music. Some of his 1990s writing on mainstream country music can be found at www.rocksbackpages.com <http://www.rocksbackpages.com/>

Jonathan R. Wynn is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is the author of Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport, and The Tour Guide: Walking and Talking New York.