Jean-Victor is a Psychiatrist at Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris, and a Lecturer and researcher at Sorbonne University. He specializes in the treatment of new addictions and bipolar disorder. He is the author of Pop & Psy (Plon 2019) and Addicts (Arkhê 2021), books that use film, TV, and public statements by celebrities and pop icons to demystify mental health. In 2018, he founded “Culture Pop et Psy” in an effort to change the way people view mental illness and improve the inclusion of those affected, an initiative that encompasses his social media advocacy as @culturepopetpsy, his podcasts “Psycho Pop” and “Pop & Psy,” his monthly film club and lecture series at the Brady and Mk2, and the annual Pop & Psy Festival.

Jessica is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen, and 4EU+ Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne iPLesp in connection with the research for her book project, The Musical Vernacular of Depression (University of Michigan, under contract). Jessica’s work examines the representation of disability in contemporary popular music, with emphasis gender, vocality, and embodiment. Forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press, her first book Music at the Margins of Sense analyzes the multi-sensory dynamics of deaf experiences of music. She has published articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Journal of the Society for American Music, among others.

Lauron is an Associate Professor of Music at Smith College. Their research focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in American popular music, especially hip hop. Their first book, Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance (University of Michigan Press 2022) examines the work of Black queer and trans artists in hip hop. They are currently co-editing a volume with Stephanie Jensen-Moulton called “Better Be Good to Me”: American Popular Songs as Domestic Violence Narratives (under contract, University of Michigan Press).

Lizzie is a second year PhD student at the University of Bristol, working across the Departments of Music, English, and affiliated with the University’s Centre for Black Humanities. Her project considers a sub-genre of UK rap known as conscious rap, thinking about longer-form rap albums with politically conscious overtones as works of Black-British autofiction. She is also a research associate at the University of Westminster’s Black Music Research Unit, which has just curated the first ever national exhibition of Black-British music at the British Library.

Paul is a Lecturer of Popular Music and Music Business at Nottingham Trent University. Performing under the artist name of Cappo, he has practiced hip hop lyricism for over two decades. During this time, he has appeared at many of Europe’s premier live music venues, performing alongside artists such as Public Enemy, Skepta, and The Sleaford Mods. Paul’s interdisciplinary research focuses on popular culture, literary devices and musical concepts such as intertextuality and allusion, and the semiotic analysis of song lyrics. The nature of Cappo’s praxis links his work to rap music, English literature, creative writing, and media studies.

Dan (he/they) is a musician and Assistant Professor of Music at Boston University. Dan’s first book, Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life was published in 2022 and shortlisted for the IASPM international book prize in 2023. Their second book, Big Feelings: Queer and Feminist Indie Rock After Riot Grrrl, is forthcoming with the Tracking Pop series at the University of Michigan Press. Other work has appeared in Jazz & Culture, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the collection Rancière and Music, the journal Audimat, and more. Dan currently serves as the secretary of IASPM-US.

Jillian is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Florida. She studies relationships between music, sound, and trauma in various historical, cultural, and contemporary contexts. Jill is the author of Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars, and her work on music and trauma, sound studies, and French music has appeared or is forthcoming in Transposition, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Music & Letters, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music & Politics, and Journal of the Royal Musical Association. She is a co-editor for The Oxford Handbook of Music, Sound, and Trauma Studies.

Natalie is a PhD candidate in Music History/Theory at the University of Chicago. She has been published in Music and Letters, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Journal of Sound and Music in Games, The Palgrave Handbook of Scoring Peak TV: Music and Sound in Television’s New “Golden Age”, and The Flutist Quarterly. She is particularly passionate about trauma-informed pedagogy and has served as a Senior Teaching Fellow at the Chicago Center for Teaching and Learning. In her free time, she likes to knit and spend time with her dog (who is named after Leonard Bernstein).

Ceyda is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on music and politics in contemporary Turkey, with a specific focus on the Erdoğan/AKP regime since 2002. Within the context of the liberal-Islamist AKP hegemony, she explores a series of musical phenomena in relation to populism, authoritarianism, and the rise of radical right. Prior to her doctoral studies, she received an M.A. in Musicology from Istanbul Technical University Center for Advanced Studies in Music (2019) and a B.A. in Sociology from Boğaziçi University (2016).

Sheyla is a Postdoctoral researcher in the Graduate Program in Social History at the University of São Paulo, where she conducts the project Metá Metá: Sociocultural Knowledge through Contemporary Brazilian Song, funded by FAPESP. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology (2017) from the State University of Campinas (Brazil), with the dissertation Desbundados e Marginais: MPB e Contracultura nos Anos de Chumbo (1969–1974). Her research focuses on the sociology of culture, popular music, and the social history of song. She is the author of the book De Tudo que a Gente Sonhou: Amigos e Canções do Clube da Esquina (2017). She was a doctoral research fellow at UVSQ (France) and a postdoctoral visiting scholar at Tulane University.

Jeremy is Associate Professor at the Culture and Communication Department at Audencia Business School in Nantes, France, and Associate Member of the LabSIC at the Sorbonne Paris North University. His book Fantasy, Neoliberalism and Precariousness: Coping Strategies in the Cultural Industries was published by Emerald in 2022. His latest articles include, “Toward a sociological explanation of anxiety: Precariousness, class and gender among independent musicians” in The Sociological Review (2024), and “Utopia isn’t for Everyone’: Career Inequalities and Adaptations among Female Independent Musicians” in Biens Symboliques/Symbolic Goods (2024).

Melanie is a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Music at New York University and a Research Associate at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Focusing on the mental health of creative workers from a social science perspective, she works at the intersection of popular music studies and public health. Her research interests include music and well-being, health narratives in popular culture, careers in music, labour markets, and urban music cultures. Her research is funded by the German Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Walter Benjamin program of the German Research Foundation (DFG).

George is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Sociology and Creative Industries at Goldsmiths University of London. His specialism concerns the psychological experiences and working conditions of creative careers, with a focus on mental health and wellbeing in the music industry. He holds collaboratively funded research projects around the world on mental health and the music industry. His research has been published in journals across multiple disciplines including medicine/health (The Lancet, The Lancet Psychiatry, Frontiers in Public Health), music psychology (Musicae Scientiae, Psychology of Music) and the social sciences and cultural studies (Poetics, Cultural Trends). 

Matthew is a musicologist, media/information studies scholar, and classical/pop musician whose interests orbit the figure of the musical amateur, engaging contemporary digital practice, modern recording engineering and sound design, and nineteenth-century print cultures—each through the lens of the social construction of technology, authorship, and “intellectual property.” His research has been recognized with the Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship and the Ingolf Dahl Award from the American Musicological Society. Prior to graduate study at UCLA, Matthew performed as a DJ and contributed keyboards, programming, and string arrangements to indie pop, hip-hop, and heavy-metal recordings in Los Angeles.

Jacob is Departmental Lecturer in Music at the University of Oxford, where he also serves as Chair of Faculty in the Faculty of Music and Organising Tutor in Music at Lady Margaret Hall. His research links contemporary music, sound studies, continental philosophy, music technology, and empirical approaches to the study of music consumption and creation. His first monograph, provisionally titled Headphone Listening: Space, Embodiment, Materiality, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic. He makes regular appearances on broadcast media and, in 2024, was named as a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.

Veronika Muchitsch (PhD) is a researcher in Musicology at Uppsala University. Her work is situated at the crossing of feminist theory, musicology, and sound studies and examines the mediation of music, meaning, and subjectivity in musical (techno)cultures of the 21st century. Recent publications include a study of memetic negotiations of feelings and quotidian knowledges in TikTok’s music cultures (Popular Music and Society, 2024).
She is the project leader of a three-year independent research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (2025-28) on the mediation of mental health in girls*’ participatory practices in online music cultures, focusing on TikTok.

Hannah (she/they) is a French-German MA student in Media Studies and a
member of the Digital Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality (DIGS) Lab at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada. Centred in affect and queer theory, her research examines queer youths’ music fandom practices on TikTok, particularly in relation to expressions of emotions, mental health, and queer identity conceptions. Their work has been published/presented in outlets such as the Journal of Lesbian Studies, the Canadian Communication Association Conference, and the Association of Internet Researchers Conference.

John (Jack) is a music theorist, composer, and violist currently pursuing his PhD in Music Theory at the University of Texas at Austin in Austin, Texas, USA. His interests include popular music, genre theory, social class theory, hermeneutics, and broader conceptions of music and meaning. Some of his previous work has examined specific performance practices and their interpretive significance in contemporary hip-hop. His current research examines music’s role in mental health regulation and as a community-building and subcultural agent for Gen Z in the United States.

Graham Ellinghausen is an independent scholar based in Chicago.

Ramona is a Los Angeles based musician, multimedia artist, and scholar. Her
forthcoming dissertation, Why Sad Song?: Women’s Laments in Popular Music, aims to revitalize the study of women’s lament—a musical expression central not only to the historical processing of grief, but to female creativity. In her research, Ramona investigates the nature and function of laments, or “sad songs,” within contemporary pop music, through the examination of work by artists Björk, Rosalía, and Sade. Ramona is also a professional recording artist, having performed for over a decade under the moniker Nite Jewel, for which she has received accolades from outlets such as Rolling Stone, The New York Times, NPR, and The Guardian.

James Grier is President-Elect of the Academy of Arts and Humanities at the Royal Society of Canada. He has published widely on music and liturgy in medieval Aquitaine, textual criticism and editing music, and post-World War II popular music. His article on “Frank Zappa’s Music Designs in 200 Motels” has just been accepted for publication in Journal of the American Musicological Society, his fifth article in this journal across five decades, 1988, 1992, 2003, 2013 and now 2026.

Magdalena is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Senior Scientist at the Department of Popular Music at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. As co-leader of the projects “Performing Diversity” and “Female Jazz Musicians in Austria,”,her recent research has focused on performativity, gender and intersectionality in pop and rock music, Austrian music scenes, and gender/identity in jazz. She is co-author of Aufführungsrituale der Musik. Zur Konstituierung kultureller Vielfalt am Beispiel Österreich (2021), co-editor of the TheMA special issue Yugoslav Disco. Digging into an “excluded” musical culture of late socialism (2024) and Handbuch Jazz (Metzler/Bärenreiter, 2026).

Jacob (He/They) is an Assistant Professor of Musicology in the Hayes School of Music at Appalachian State University. Their research uses archives, ethnography, and pop music analysis to examine queer/trans performance and cultural organizing in the United States. Dr. Kopcienski has presented at the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the International Association for Popular Music Studies-US, the International Country Music Conference, the Appalachian Studies Association, and the Society for Applied Anthropology. They have publications in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of Appalachian Studies, and on I Care if You Listen.

Charles is Associate Professor of Musicology/Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses on contemporary art music, popular music, hip hop, and jazz. His research interests include African-American expressive cultures, American musics, and music and tourism. He is a founding member of the international research collective, the Center for Research in Artistic Citizenship (CReArC), based in Malmö, Sweden. He also currently serves as the Mike and Patty Erspamer Scholar-in-Residence for the Austin Opera. He has presented and published on a variety of topics ranging from smooth jazz to theme park music.

Annie is the owner and Principal Music Therapist at Moxie Music Therapy, LLC in Austin, TX, and the Music Therapist for Eanes Independent School District servicing students in Special Education. Annie earned her BA in Music from The University of Texas at Austin and a Master’s of Music Therapy at Sam Houston State University. Annie’s music therapy practice emphasizes a strengths-based approach while also incorporating techniques supported by research to assist all clients in reaching their goals. Annie’s clinical experience with children, adults, and seniors has enabled her to learn from a variety of populations, including clients with emotional and behavioral disorders, and intellectual and developmental disabilities. Providing empathic, individualized treatment is fundamental to her practice.

Michelle a Senior Lecturer in Music History and Culture and programme leader for the MMus and Postgraduate Diplomas at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London. Her research uses trauma theory and gender studies within archival and ethnographic approaches to study intersections of music with memory and cultures of care in Britain from the 19th century to today, particularly in relation to motherhood, mental health, and the narrativizing of experience. She recently co-edited special journal issues Women and Music and for Nineteenth-Century Music Review, and she is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Music, Sound, and Trauma Studies (2027). Her research has been funded by Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Association of University Women

Ajitpaul is an Assistant Professor of English at Niagara University. Dr. Mangat’s current book project, entitled Forms of Affiliation, shows how disability life writing imagines the
socialization of care through the formalization of networked relations of affiliation. His work is forthcoming or published in the edited collections, Care and Disability and Neurodiversity on Television, as well as the Journal of Popular Music Studies and Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal. He is the co-editor of an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies on “narrative prosthesis” and presently serves as a contributor-in-residence for Synapsis.

Elizabeth is currently studying for her PhD in Music at the University of Liverpool. Her thesis, working title ‘The Recontextualisation of Moving Image Music in Live Performance’, discusses concerts of music from film, television, and video games. This builds on foundations laid within her MRes dissertation research, outputs of which can be found in her published chapters – ‘My Childhood is in Your Hands: Video Game Concerts as Commodified and Tangible Nostalgic Experiences’ (2022) and ‘Video Games Live and the Gamification of the Orchestral Experience’ (2024). Elizabeth has discussed her research on moving image music concerts at various international conferences.