Biography

Joanna Demers, assistant professor of musicology, specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular and concert music. She holds a PhD in musicology from Princeton University (2002) and a DMA in contemporary flute performance from UC San Diego (2002). Her doctoral dissertation, Sampling As Lineage In Hip-hop, was awarded an Alvin Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship in 2001. Her work has appeared in Popular Music, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Social Science Research Network, and she has presented papers at annual meetings of the AMS, IASPM, the American Studies Association, the Experience Music Project, and the Society of American Music. Her monograph, Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (University of Georgia Press) won the 2006 Book of the Year award from the Popular Culture Association. Her next book examines the aesthetics of electronic music since 1980, and its writing is being supported by a postdoctoral research grant from the American Association of University Women.