Biography

Jade Conlee is a Rising Scholars Postdoctoral Fellow in the Music Department at the University of Virginia. She specializes in antiracist and anticolonial approaches to the history of American popular music, jazz, and music theory. Her research works broadly across the music disciplines and engages with Black studies, Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities to ask how music and sound mediate our relationships to race, place, and the natural world. Her current book project studies how background music facilitated the expansion of American empire in the Pacific from the 1950s to present. Drawing on archival and ethnographic methods, it explores how background musicians and listeners have used music to depict the feel of tropical space, and in doing so, forged and contested the spatial imaginaries of U.S. colonialism. Jade is also co-editor of the edited volume Insurgent Music Theory: Terminology and Critical Methods for Antiracist Music Studies, under contract with the University of Michigan Press’ “Music and Social Justice” series. Drawing on critiques of Enlightenment humanism from Black and Indigenous studies, the book reimagines music theory’s epistemic foundations by redefining and expanding the core terminology music scholars use to describe what music is and how it works. Trained as a pianist specializing in contemporary classical music, Conlee received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Music Studies from Yale University and holds a M.M. in Piano Performance from the University at Buffalo and a B.M. in Piano Performance from New York University. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and Yale University’s Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.