Kevin Schattenkirk
Lecturer in Music and Honors Faculty

I am an Ethnomusicologist and Music Historian. I completed my undergraduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle (my hometown!), and remained on campus for Master’s degrees in Ethnomusicology (2008) and Music History (2010). An opportunity arose for me to move to Perth, Australia at the beginning of 2011, which is where I began work on my Doctorate – starting June 2012, at the University of Western Australia. While living and working in the land down under, I was fortunate to receive a prestigious government scholarship that funded my research. I completed my Doctoral dissertation and earned my PhD in 2018.

My research focus is the history and performance aesthetics of gay men’s choruses in the US, and their regular commissioning program of new music to address issues of concern. A large portion of my work focuses on community music making, and Christopher Small’s idea of “musicking” – that “to music” (as a verb) is to participate in the making of music, whether as performers or as listeners, in the rehearsal space or on the concert stage. A secondary area of research interest is the intersection of popular music studies and LGBTQ and gender & sexuality.

It is my pleasure to have joined the Longwood University faculty in Fall 2020. I am fortunate enough to teach sections of a course I designed for the Cormier Honors College “Inquiry Into Citizenship” (CTZN110) series, called “Music, Identity and Social Change.” I am also teaching a section of Intro to World Music.

For the last 3 years, I’ve served as a chair for the Marcia Herndon Prize for article submissions, awarded through the Gender & Sexualities Taskforce special interest group of Society for Ethnomusicology.

Currently teaching:

• CTZN 110: Popular Music, Identity, and Social Change
• MUSC: Introduction to World Music