Overview
Moira de Kok is a PhD student in the Music and Sound Studies program. She pursues interdisciplinary research at the intersections of music, media, and socio-political themes. The foremost example of this is her enduring interest in the connection between popular music and solidarity, particularly in the context of the 1984–85 miners’ strike in the UK. Her BA thesis on the music of the 2014 movie Pride, which takes the strike as its setting, was awarded the 2021 IASPM Benelux Popular Music Thesis Prize. Her MA thesis, which investigates how solidarity intertwined with real-life musical practices during the strike, has been selected to compete for the 2023 Best Research Master Thesis Prize of the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. In addition, she has presented her work on the strike at national and international conferences in the Netherlands and Finland.
Besides solidarity and the 1984–85 strike, other long-standing research interests include: the Eurovision Song Contest; the interactions between body, gender, and voice or instrument; popular music in East Asia; the aesthetics of music on YouTube and other internet spaces; and music’s ability to cross and blur diegetic lines.
Prior to arriving at Cornell, Moira received a BA (cum laude) in Musicology with a minor in Gender and Postcolonial Studies, and an MA (cum laude) in Musicology, both from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.