Overview
Benjamin P. Skoronski (he/him) is a Ph.D. student in Music and Sound Studies at Cornell University. He studies the intellectual history of music in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States, with a focus on the music scholarship of social progressives, radical reformers, and intellectuals in the years preceding the formation of U.S. musicology. His research examines the proto-musicological discourses marginalized at the discipline’s founding—the scholarship by, of, and for underrepresented communities that constitutes what he provisionally terms an “undisciplined musicology.” His work on these intellectual histories has led to parallel interests in U.S. folk music and folklore, historiographies of comparative musicology, and the intersections of race, class, gender, and professionalism. Skoronski has presented 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 Presser Scholar Award, the University of Arizona Medici Scholarship, and the UofA School of Music’s 2021–2022 Distinguished Graduate Student Award. Before beginning his doctoral studies at Cornell, Skoronski was a lecturer at the University of Arizona’s Fred Fox School of Music.