Overview
Benjamin P. Skoronski (he/him) is a Ph.D. student of Music and Sound Studies at Cornell University. He is interested in the early history of musicology in the United States, prior to the 1934 founding of the American Musicological Society and external to the elite circles of the university music department. His interest is in the music scholarship of social progressives and radical reformists standing at the perimeter of a discipline in formation—independent scholars, interdisciplinary interlopers, amateur-professionals, and dilettantes studying and theorizing musics marginalized by professional musicology and the US societal hegemony. He has presented this work, alongside his secondary research interests of 20th-century modernisms, media theory, and critical organology, at various national and international conferences. As an undergraduate student Skoronski won a 2018–2019 Presser Scholar Award, and while earning his master’s degree in musicology at the University of Arizona he was awarded the 2020 Medici Scholar Award as well as the School of Music’s 2021–2022 Distinguished Graduate Student Award. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies at Cornell, Skoronski taught as a lecturer at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music.