Dr. James Deaville
James Deaville is a Musicologist specializing in music, composers and musical practices and institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries, having published and spoken about such diverse topics as Franz Liszt, music criticism, television news music, African-American entertainers in turn-of-the-century Vienna and “fascist” Nordic composers during the Third Reich. In 2008, his article “Publishing Paraphrases and Creating Collectors: Friedrich Hofmeister, Franz Liszt, and the Technology of Popularity” from Liszt and His World (Princeton University Press) received the Richard S. Hill award of the Music Library Association for the best article published in 2006. He has edited or co-edited books about Wagner (Pendragon), Liszt (Pendragon), Peter Cornelius (Schott) and Music and Broadcasting (under review), and guest edited special issues of the 19th Century Music Review and Canadian University Music Review. He has contributed to books published by Oxford, Cambridge, Routledge, Princeton, Yale, Ashgate and Rochester (among others), and has published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, 19th Century Music Review, Echo, Current Musicology, Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft and Canadian University Music Review (among others). As an Advisory Board member for the Grove Dictionary of American Music, he was responsible for Canadian music and musicians and musical concepts, terms and scholarly approaches.
Dr. Anabel Maler
Dr. Anabel Maler is a scholar of music theory with interests in music and disability studies, music in Deaf culture, music perception, embodiment and gesture, post-tonal form, and the intersections of music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology. Anabel was born outside of Ottawa, Ontario, and received her B.Mus and M.A. in music theory from McGill University. She earned a PhD in music theory and history from the University of Chicago in 2018, where she completed a dissertation titled “Hearing Form in Post-Tonal Music.”
Anabel’s current research project is titled Seeing Voices: Analyzing Sign Language Music. This book, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press, provides the first monograph-length analytical methodology for engaging with sign language music, a central musical output of Deaf culture. Seeing Voices argues for taking signed music seriously as an object of analytical inquiry and builds a theoretical foundation for engaging with this music as music, by exploring the history, cultural contexts, and principal musical parameters of sign language music. It reveals that sign language music, rather than being peripheral to music studies, can teach us a great deal about how, when, and why movement becomes musical in a cultural context. In doing so, it adds to the new and growing bodies of literature on Deaf musical culture, music and disability, and musical embodiment and gesture. Anabel has received grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Iowa’s Arts and Humanities Initiative, and the Obermann Center to support the completion of the book.
Anabel’s research on sign language, Deafness, disability, and music has appeared in Music Theory Online, Music Perception, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies. Her work has also recently appeared in translation in the French-language journal Circuit: musiques contemporaines. Her research on post-tonal formal function has appeared in the journal Intégral. She has presented her research at numerous regional, national, and international conferences on music theory and analysis, musicology, and Disability Studies. She previously taught at Indiana University and the University of Iowa.
Dr. Sean Zdenek
Sean Zdenek is associate professor of technical and professional writing at the University of Delaware. His research interests include web accessibility, disability studies, sound studies, and rhetorical theory and criticism. Prior to joining the Department of English in 2017, Dr. Zdenek was a faculty member at Texas Tech University for fourteen years, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses on a range of subjects, including rhetorical criticism and theory, disability studies, web accessibility, sound studies, designing technical instructions, multimodal composition, technical communication theory, writing for publication, document design, professional report writing, and writing style. Dr. Zdenek's book, Reading Sounds: Closed-Captioned Media and Popular Culture (University of Chicago Press), received the 2017 best book award in technical or scientific communication from the Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs).