Category: Academia

I advised Brielle Leibman’s ethnographic honors thesis entitled, “Eat, Pray, Love: Situating Gender, at a Dhurpad Gurukul Within and Beyond India” during the 2015-2016 academic year at William Paterson University. I met Brielle with other bright students in the Popular Music and Genre Study I and II course sequence, required courses that I designed for…

I had the distinct honor to co-advise and be a committee member for Jasmine Henry’s masters thesis in the spring of 2016 at William Paterson University.  Her thesis entitled, “‘Is R&B Having an Identity Crisis?’ Examining the ‘R&B Identity Crisis’ Phenomenon in the Contemporary Music Industry,” examines the intersection of musical style, anxieties of changing…

On April 10th, I presented a research paper entitled “Amplifying Jazz as Cultural Repatriation in Harlem: Jazzmobile and the Urban Soundscape” at the Locations and Dislocations: An Ecomusicological Conversation conference at the Westminster Choir College of Rider University. The following is the abstract for the paper: Amplifying Jazz as Cultural Repatriation in Harlem: Jazzmobile and the Urban…

On April 3rd, I presented a research paper entitled, “Amplifying From the Shadows: Representation and Metarepresentation in Live Music Production” at the Music and Labour conference at the University of Toronto. The following is the abstract for the paper: Amplifying From the Shadows: Representation and Metarepresentation in Live Music Production Whitney Slaten, Columbia University How…

I had the honor of being invited to speak at the Columbia Black Law Student’s Association’s annual Paul Robeson Conference on the 27th of February.  As a member of the panel entitled, “Art, Citizenship and Community,” I discussed my experiences conducting ethnographic fieldwork at Jazzmobile productions in Harlem, rock productions in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and music theater…

On Sunday, November 8th, I presented a research paper entitled, “Liveness, Sonic Color, and Transparency: The Creative Agency of Mixing Recorded and Live Broadway Productions of Porgy and Bess” at the Art of Record Production in Philadelphia. The following is the abstract for the paper: Liveness, Sonic Color, and Transparency: The Creative Agency of Mixing…

The following is an excerpt from a masterclass by Randy Weston and Abdellah El Gourd detailing the highlights of Randy Weston’s prolific career, as well as the healing practice of the Moroccan Gnawa people by Abdellah El Gourd.  This masterclass was a part of the World Music History course at the School of Jazz and…

This is a lecture/demonstration of a 1904 Edison Phonograph to students of the Technologies of Global Pop course at Lang College at The New School.  

I presented a research paper entitled, “Transparency, color, and liveness: An ethnographic study of the live sound engineering of Porgy and Bess on Broadway” at the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML) and International Musicological Society (IMS) Congress entitled Music Research in the Digital Age at Lincoln Center in New York…

I presented a research paper entitled, “Sonic Color and the Transparency of Live Music Production: Mixing Porgy & Bess on Broadway” at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Canada conference at the University of Ottawa on May 29th. The following is the abstract for the paper: Sonic Color and the Transparency of…

On February 21, 2015, the world lost a great leader, social theorist, jazz artist, master of the trumpet and flugelhorn, my mentor and friend: Clark Terry. Terry bestowed upon music an unfading contribution, one that everyone should encounter in his masterful craft that has impacted popular culture for generations.  Each of us must critically engage…

  Columbia was well repesented in the panel discussion orgaized by Ethnomusicology PhD Student Whitney Slaten at the 2015 annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) in Louisville last week.  The title of the panel was “Representing Labor in Digital Media: Radio, Records and Live Performance” and it represented an extension…

I was invited to present a research paper entitled, “Faders, Engineers and Genres: Mixing Live Music in New York City” at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, in association with the Africana Studies Department of Oberlin College. The following is an excerpt from the paper: “I have chosen to focus on the relatively inconspicuous social encounters between…