I am a PhD candidate in music theory and Lynne Cooper Harvey fellow in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. My career goal is to help prepare students as literate, informed participants across a diffuse array of musical cultures, enabling them practice engaged listening irrespective of their musical training and aesthetic preferences.


As a researcher, my work focuses on race, regionalism, and recording process in contemporary musical subcultures across the US. In 2022, I completed a master’s thesis studying musical technique in contemporary underground hip-hop, featuring close readings of songs by artists including billy woods, Open Mike Eagle, ELUCID, Moor Mother, and others. Although hip-hop remains the stylistic cornerstone of my work, my interest in musical subcultures breaches other forms of electronic and dance music subculture, as well as those that fall within the broad umbrellas of post-punk, emo, and hardcore.


My dissertation is currently titled An Unknown Infinite: Musical Practice and Discourses of Undergroundness in Contemporary Hip-Hop, and it both conceptually focuses and methodologically expands my approach to my thesis. In this project I collaborate with and analyze alongside a number of creatives in the independent hip-hop scenes in Queens and Brooklyn to demonstrate how these participants express, historicize, and revise the larger imaginary of the hip-hop tradition within the flexible boundaries of the local scene. My aim is less to define what a hip-hop underground is than it is to explore the types of participation that allows for a hip-hop underground to form as a stable historically and regionally bounded coalition for a time.


Beyond the classroom, I am a participant in South St. Louis’s electronic, punk, and visual arts scenes, where I work with a number of local musicians and artists to facilitate events for multimodal creatives and open-minded listeners. Alongside 18andcounting and Superman Damn Fool, I coordinate a hardware synth and electronics meetup called Modular Mobb, which convenes on the last Wednesdays of every month at Moshmellow on Cherokee street.


More on my various research and performance engagements are on the other pages of this site. Feel free to get in contact if you have any questions or want to collaborate in some capacity!!