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Tracy McMullen's areas of interest include race, gender, class, etc. and musical performance; American music and culture; cultural memory; identity and improvisation; jazz; popular music; twentieth and twenty-first century Western "art music"; and musical re-enactment. She received her Ph.D. in Critical Studies/Experimental Practices from the University of California, San Diego in December 2007. As a Postdoctoral Fellow with the "Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice" Research Initiative at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada (2007-2008), she undertook initial work on the theory of an "improvisative." Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Current Musicology, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies, People Get Ready: The Future of Jazz is Now, The Encyclopedia of African American Music, The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, and the Grove Dictionary of American Music.
Dr. McMullen's forthcoming book, Replay: Repetition and Identity Compulsion from ABBA to Zizek (solicited by Duke University Press) examines the growth of live musical re-enactment in relation to postmodern anxieties about impermanence and intersubjectivity. Her second major project forms a response to Replay and examines improvisation as an alternative model for negotiating identity, suggesting a theorization of an improvisative, rather than a performative. Her undergraduate courses include "Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music," "Introduction to Feminist Theory," and "Music, Gender, and Culture." Her graduate seminar, "Gender and Performance: An Interdisciplinary Investigation" examines performance scholarship from a variety of fields (dance, music, theater, speech act theory, critical improvisation studies), and the ways in which gender and race figure into conceptions of performance as ephemeral and non-symbolizable.
When she is not teaching, writing, and researching she is practicing and/or performing as a jazz/experimental saxophonist. She has performed or recorded with George Lewis, Anthony Davis, Dana Reason, Mark Dresser, Pauline Oliveros, and many others and can be heard on the Cadence Jazz label.
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