Overview
Benjamin P. Skoronski is an intellectual and cultural historian of US folk music and folklore from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. His dissertation project, “Undisciplined Musicology: Theorizing Folk Music in the United States, 1863–1934,” argues that folk music functioned as a site of knowledge production and political possibility through which activist intellectuals theorized music beyond—and in contestation with—the disciplinary authority of the modern university.
Skoronski is interested in the challenges that folk music poses toward institutions, and the opportunities that it provides for reformers, radicals, and revolutionaries. He proposes an alternative history of US folk music written by “the folk” themselves: working class and racialized intellectuals who studied music to theorize citizenship at the margins of modern society. Skoronski is also interested in contemporary questions of music and artificial intelligence, particularly surrounding questions of labor and political economy.
Skoronski has presented his work at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Society for American Music, as well as the 2022 quinquennial congress of the International Musicological Society. He is the recipient of the Don M. Randel Teaching Fellowship (2026–2027), the University of Arizona School of Music’s Distinguished Graduate Student Award (2021–2022), the UofA Medici Scholar Award (2020), and the Presser Scholar Award (2018–2019). Before beginning his doctoral studies at Cornell, Skoronski was a lecturer at the University of Arizona’s Fred Fox School of Music.
Publications
“Henry Edward Krehbiel tests a consensus regarding the minor modality of African American folksong (1914).” In Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, Lester Hu, and Carmel Raz (University of Chicago CORPUS, forthcoming).
“John W. Work II charts the evolution of an African scale into an African American scale (1915).” In Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, Lester Hu, and Carmel Raz (University of Chicago CORPUS, forthcoming).
“Marion Rous lectures on European modernism, as reviewed by W. J. Henderson (1924).” In Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, Lester Hu, and Carmel Raz (University of Chicago CORPUS, forthcoming).
“Thomas W. Talley discusses the construction, tuning, and playing of African American quills (1922).” In Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, edited by Thomas Christensen, Lester Hu, and Carmel Raz (University of Chicago CORPUS, forthcoming).