Biography

Alonya Castillo is a PhD student in the Critical and Comparative Studies program. Her research interests include: Black feminism; Black performance in R&B and Hip-Hop music and horror films; Afrofuturism; and the Romantic notions of the sublime, grotesque, the uncanny, and the Other. More specifically she is interested in the ways in which Black music and performance are used as sites of resistance.

In 2022, she became an AMS Eileen Southern Scholar and graduated with her master's degree in musicology from the University of Mississippi. Her master’s thesis explored (re)negotiations of Black femininity and expressions of Black feminist and Pan-Africanist rhetoric in R&B and Hip-Hop. In 2020, she received her B.A in music from UC Davis with emphases in ethnomusicology, music history, music theory and music composition. Her senior thesis focused on operatic syntax and dramaturgy and Afrofuturism in Janelle Monaé’s Dirty Computer (2018).