Biography

Sam Golter is a PhD student in the Critical and Comparative Studies program at UVA. His work looks at the intersection of music and American politics during moments of hegemonic state-building. His Master’s thesis at the University of Oregon, “Women Rappers and the Neoliberal Politics of Indifference,” questions the lack of attention paid to female gangsta rappers in the early 1990s, a time when the genre’s violence and misogyny was used by lawmakers and pundits as a symptom of a criminal culture that necessitated massive prison expansion. He has also done work on themes of dying and transcendence in San Francisco disco during the AIDS epidemic, the relationship between eugenics and Anglo-Saxon folk song collecting during the Progressive Era, and amateur music-making in the contemporary Flat Earth movement. He has recently presented his research at Pop Con in the Museum of Popular Culture in Seattle, the South Central Graduate Music Conference, and the University of Virginia’s annual Flute Forum. He is the editor of Pauline Oliveros’ Anthology of Text Scores and was a line editor for William Cheng’s Just Vibrations: The Politics of Sounding Good.

Before coming to the University of Virginia, Sam received Masters degrees in Musicology and Flute Performance from the University of Oregon where he worked and taught in the Ethnic Studies department as well as the music department. He also holds undergraduate degrees in Flute Performance and Gender Studies from Lawrence University.