About

I was raised among farmers, teachers, artists, and laborers from rural Illinois. Though my work has taken me far from home the qualities that define my family continue to shape me as a leader, a scholar, a musician, and a man: dignity, decency, kindness, and wisdom.

I spent three years at a liberal arts college before leaving after my mother contracted cancer. Working as as car salesman, iron cutter, and steel handler, I struggled for years before finding my way back to an academic life. In the spring semester of 2010 I returned, completed the B.A., and found a place to belong. Leadership and teaching have always come naturally and in musicology I found a profession whose only limits are one’s ambition and imagination. Music research has provided me with a platform to work across disciplines, speak multiple languages, as well as lead choirs and work with singers. In 2011 Butler University offered me the chance to work with students and receive 1-1 training from some inspiring music researchers, conductors, composers, and theorists. I adapted so quickly that after two years of graduate study I won a Fulbright research grant to Austria.

Research

Current Work: “Hearing Noreia: Landscape, Memory, and Identity in Carinthian Song, 1870 - 1920”

“You are a leaving people. We are a staying people.”

Musicianship

Like most disciplines, music is best understood by those who immerse themselves in it. I have been teaching music courses in higher education for about five years, I lead ensembles, give voice lessons, make arrangements for voices and instruments, perform several times per year,

Pedagogy

Teaching, to me, is a civic duty. Having taught in university settings for the better part of five years and more recently as a long-term substitute in a high school French classroom, I have witnessed a chasm growing between even the brightest public school graduates and the expectations of competent college students. The emphasis on top-loading grades, the need for regularly quantifiable data points, and the increasingly isolated nature of subject teaching in high schools is producing a rising percentage of students who struggle with the cross-curricular thought needed to be successful at university and beyond.

This is why I emphasize proven practice pedagogy, a demanding but highly effective method of blending a student’s past, present, a future that has produced a large number of graduate students and successful professionals. I have found that intertwining the structure of public school with the long-term project planning of scholarship or administration, coupled with the need for expansive thought found in higher education and the occasionally nebulous expectations of the working world creates an environment where students must trust themselves and, eventually, the process.

International

I have been traveling, educating, and making connections internationally since 2005. At the start of graduate study in 2011 I had only rudimentary German reading ability but, by 2013, I could read proficiently in German, Italian, and French. It was in this year that my life would change forever—when my research proposal was selected by an international panel of professionals and I became a Fulbright fellow.

Local

Since moving to Easton, Pennsylvania in the summer of 2017, I have made every effort to become an engaged member of our local neighborhood community on College Hill, and within the larger Easton and Lehigh Valley communities.

I currently serve as the Public Affairs committee chairman on the College Hill Neighborhood Association executive board. In this role I am responsible for attending and participating in local city events and meetings, including city council meetings, school board meetings, and other meetings focused on public interest topics for the residents of College Hill. I see the opportunities that exist for not only our neighborhood but the larger city and community to make a difference, and am excited about the role I will play in those changes.