Biography

Emily Mellen joined the PhD program in Critical and Comparative Studies of Music in Fall 2017. Her research interests include voice studies, radio studies, music and sound in the Arab world, music & politics, theories of colonialism and anti-colonial movements, and postcolonial, feminist, and sound-based approaches to the digital humanities. Her dissertation will discuss Radio Bari, a Fascist propaganda radio station that broadcast in Arabic from Southern Italy towards the Middle East & North Africa from 1934-1943. 

Emily was a Praxis fellow in the digital humanities from 2019-2020 and previously worked as an intern in web design for Take Back the Archive (an archive of the history of sexual violence at UVa) and for the President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation. Currently, she is serving as an intern for the provost’s office for Global Affairs. She has received travel grants from the African Urbanism Lab and the Institute of World Languages, as well as grants to attend the Summer School in Global Studies and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna and the Collections as Data course at the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching at Indiana University/Purdue University. 

Before joining the University of Virginia, Emily received a B.A. in Music History with a minor in Arabic and Islamic Studies from UCLA. Her B.A. thesis, entitled Voicing Arab Nationalism: Interpreting Singers Fairuz and Umm Kulthum, was awarded the Friends of Musicology Best Undergraduate Senior Thesis prize.