Susan Thomas

Susan Thomas, associate professor of music and women's studies received her Ph.D. in musicology from Brandeis University.  Her research interests include music and gender; Cuban and Latin American music; transnationalism, migration, and diaspora; embodiment and performativity, and media studies. Her book Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage (University of Illinois Press, 2008), received the 2009 Pauline Alderman Book Award.

Representative articles and chapters include:

• ·      "Cosmopolitan, International, Transnational: Locating Cuban Music," in Fernandez, ed., Cuba Transnational (University Press of Florida, 2005).
• ·      "Did Nobody Pass the Girls the Guitar? Queer Appropriations in Contemporary Cuban Popular Song," Journal of Popular Music 18/2 (2006).
• ·      “Musical Cartographies of the Transnational City: Mapping Havana in Song,” Latin American Music Review 31/2 (2010).  
• ·      “Staged Marginalities and Projected Difference: Cuban Zarzuela and Latin American Cinema,” in Doppelbauer and Sartingen, eds., De la zarzuela al cine: Los medios de comunicación populares y su traducción de la voz marginal (Munich: Martin Meidenbauer Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2010).
• ·      “Blues Traveller: Habana Blues and the Construction of Diasporic Cubanía,” in Shaw and Stone, eds.  Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema.  (Manchester University Press, forthcoming).
• ·      “Music, Conquest, and Colonialism, in Robin Moore, ed., Musics of Latin America (W.W. Norton, forthcoming).

Dr. Thomas teaches courses on women and music, gender and music video, Cuban & Latin American music, feminist ethnography, and contemporary trends and controversies in musicology. 

Currently on leave, Dr. Thomas is spending the 2011-2012 academic year as a Santander Visiting Scholar in the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.