Faculty
Richard Ashley
847-491-5720
Richard Ashley is Associate Professor in Northwestern’s Program in Music Theory and Cognition with cross-appointments in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience. He is a founding member of both SMT and its Music Cognition Group. His research area is music cognition, focusing on the relationship between musical structure, memory, and expressive performance; he is a former President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. His publications deal with a wide range of topics, from expressive performance over many repertoires–Handel, Brahms, jazz, and funk–to the perceptual and neurophysiological processing of consonance and harmony. His co-edited volume, The Routledge Companion to Music Cognition, was awarded SMT’s Citation of Special Merit in 2019.
Jennifer Blackwell
jennifer.blackwell@northwestern.edu
847-467-1682
Jennifer Blackwell is a Canadian music educator, music researcher, and saxophonist, currently serving as assistant professor of music education at the Northwestern University Bienen School of Music. Dr. Blackwell was previously assistant professor of instrumental music education at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where she received the 2022 Presidential Citation for Meritorious Teaching. Her research interests include applied music teaching expertise (from behavioral, cognitive, social, cultural, and affective perspectives), music performance expertise, popular music pedagogy, applications of authentic context learning paradigms, feedback in music contexts, and music teacher training.
Dr. Blackwell’s research has been featured in the Journal of Research in Music Education; Psychology of Music; Journal of Music Teacher Education; Frontiers in Psychology; Journal of Research in Music Performance; International Journal of Music Education; Research Studies in Music Education; The Saxophone Symposium; Gender, Education, Music and Society; The Music Educators Journal; Canadian Music Educator; and the Oxford Handbook of Music Performance. She is a frequent presenter at research and practitioner conferences both nationally and internationally, having presented her work throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Dr. Blackwell also served as the editor of the North American Saxophone Alliance’s scholarly publication, The Saxophone Symposium from 2014-2022, and served on the executive board for the Hawaiʻi Music Educators Association from 2018-2022.
Dr. Blackwell has worked extensively as a woodwind studio teacher and ensemble director in both Canada and the United States, working with students aged 10-85 in a variety of settings including middle school, high school, community ensembles, and universities. She is an active woodwind clinician in both Canada and the United States and continues to perform as a classical saxophonist. Since 2021, she has worked with the Australian Music Examinations Board to develop syllabi and resources for certificate programs in studio music teaching for use in both Australia and Vietnam. Her edited book, Teaching Music Performance: A Guide for Evidence-Based Pedagogy, will be released by the AMEB in 2024.
Dr. Blackwell holds a bachelor’s degree in music education from the University of Western Ontario, master’s degrees in music education and saxophone performance from Central Michigan University, and a PhD in music education with a minor in saxophone performance from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
Steven Morrison
steven.morrison@northwestern.edu
847-467-4726
Steven Morrison is Professor of Music in Music Education and co-directs the Center for the Study of Education and the Musical Experience. He is an affiliate faculty member with the Cognitive Science Program. In his teaching and scholarship he emphasizes the connections between cognitive and sociological aspects of music-making as fundamental to the function and process of music education. Among his areas of research, he uses the setting of the music ensemble to examine how the integration of auditory and visual information informs judgments of musical expression, and how congruity and synchrony might be foundational components of the ensemble experience. Looking at music learning as a culturally situated phenomenon, he is exploring whether the construct of cultural distance might be an informative model for understanding the challenges teachers and students encounter when crossing musical boundaries.
Morrison’s articles have appeared in publications that include the Journal of Research in Music Education, Bulletin for the Council of Research in Music Education, Music Perception, Psychology of Music, Frontiers in Psychology, Music & Science, Music Educators Journal, Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, Neuroimage, Southern Folklore, and the Oxford handbooks of Music Performance, Music and the Brain, Cultural Neuroscience, and Music Education. He is past editor of the Journal of Research in Music Education, for which he also served on the editorial board, and is an Associate Editor for Music Perception.
Before coming to Northwestern, he was professor and chair of music education at the University of Washington where he director of the Laboratory for Music Cognition, Culture and Learning. Morrison previously served as lecturer of fine arts at the Hong Kong Institute of Education and was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge.
Morrison holds a BM from Northwestern University, MM from the University of Wisconsin, and a PhD from Louisiana State University.
Diego Pinto
diegopinto2021@u.northwestern.edu
847-491-3909
Diego Pinto is a Lecturer in the music education program at Northwestern University. His research interests include music enculturation and perceptions of self in the musical context, perceptual response to vocal ensemble movement, and world music pedagogy with a focus on the music of the African diaspora. He has presented at various research and professional development conferences, including the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, the Asia-Pacific Symposium for Music Education Research, the National Association for Music Education Biennial Conference, the Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting, the International Society for Music Education World Conference, and the American Choral Directors Association National Conference.
Dr. Pinto holds a PhD in music education from Northwestern University, a master’s degree in music education from Louisiana State University, and a bachelor’s degree in music education from the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UniRio).
Daniel Shanahan
daniel.shanahan@northwestern.edu
847-491-3178
Coordinator, music theory and cognition program. Daniel Shanahan’s research incorporates music-analytic, computational, and experimental methods to better understand the cognitive and communicative constraints of music. His interests include corpus studies, music and emotion, the oral transmission of music, the computational analysis of jazz and folk music, as well as machine learning models and generative artificial intelligence (AI).
Daniel’s work has been published in Music Perception, The Journal of New Music Research, Musicae Scientiae, The Journal of Jazz Studies, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Cognition and Emotion, Frontiers in Psychology, and Empirical Musicology Review, among others. He contributed chapters on tonality, harmony, and counterpoint to The Routledge Companion to Music Cognition (Routledge, 2017), The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy (Routledge, 2020), and has chapters in Over and Over Again: Exploring Repetition in Popular Music (Bloomsbury, 2018), as well as multiple chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Corpus Studies (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), for which he is also serving as co-editor. He has contributed book reviews to Theory and Practice, and Music Theory Online.
From 2016 until 2022, Shanahan served as co-editor of Empirical Musicology Review, after having served as the journal’s managing editor from 2012 until 2016. He has also served on the editorial boards of Music Theory Spectrum, Indiana Theory Review, Musicae Scientiae and The Journal of Creative Music Systems. He currently serves as the treasurer for the Society for Music Perception and Cognition.
In 2024, Daniel received the Mentorship Award from the Society of Music Perception and Cognition, and in 2023 he, along with his co-editors, received the Outstanding Multi-Author Collection Award from the Society for Music Theory for Volume 8 of the journal Engaging Students: Beyond Western Musicalities. He is also the recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award from the School of Music at Ohio State University, as well as both the Rising Faculty Research Award and the Undergraduate Teaching Award from Louisiana State University. Before arriving at Northwestern, Shanahan held positions at Ohio State University (where he ran the Cognitive and Systematic Musicology Lab), Louisiana State University (where he founded the Music Computation and Cognition Lab), and the University of Virginia.
Graduate Students
Huilin Guan
Ph.D. in Music Education
huilinguan2028@u.northwestern.edu
Huilin Guan is a second-year doctoral student in music education at Northwestern University. She graduated with honors from Shandong Normal University with a Bachelor of Arts in Music Education and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Master of Music Education. Growing up in Shandong Province, China, the birthplace of Confucius, shaped her focus on cultural heritage in her research. Her undergraduate projects received competitive government funding, including one from Shandong Province on “Curriculum Offerings for General Music Courses in 114 National Key Universities in China” and another from the Ministry of Education on restoring Han Dynasty music and dance. Huilin has teaching experience in diverse educational settings across China and the United States, spanning public and private schools, as well as urban and rural contexts. Her current research interests span two dimensions: one focuses on Asian immigrant groups, including Asian Americans and international students, while the other explores cross-cultural music cognition, culturally responsive teaching, and world music pedagogy.
Hannah Kabrick
Master of Music Education
hannahkabrick2025@u.northwestern.edu
Hannah Kabrick is a Master’s student in Music Education at Northwestern University. She holds a Bachelor of Music in Instrumental Music Education from Western Kentucky University. Her current research focuses on the applications of self-regulated learning to instrumental practice in studio pedagogy and school ensemble contexts. She has presented her work at the Kentucky Music Educators Association (KMEA) Conference, the American String Teachers Association (ASTA) Conference, and ASTA’s Virtual String Teachers Summit. Prior to her graduate studies, Hannah taught a private studio of violinists and served as lead teacher for Bridging Cultures with Music, which provided violin/viola group classes to ESL students in the Bowling Green, Kentucky community. As a violinist, Hannah has performed in orchestras, chamber ensembles, and as a soloist throughout the United States and France. Her latest research article, Testing a Framework for Teaching Self-Regulation Skills in Private Violin Instruction, is forthcoming for publication in ASTA’s String Research Journal.
Kim Kawczinski
Ph.D. in Music Theory and Cognition
kimberlykawczinski2028@u.northwestern.edu
Kim Kawczinski is interested in examining how musical features come to develop personal and cultural significance via repetition, ritual, and embodiment. Kim holds an M.A. in Music, Science, and Technology from Stanford University and an A.B. in Music with a double major in Physics from the University of Chicago. She has also worked in industry in the audio technology research space. Kim has previously worked on acoustical space, room reverberation, and spatial audio, including her undergraduate thesis (“On Interpreting Acoustic Space in Contemporary Musical Performance Practice”) and publications with the Audio Engineering Society and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Kim also plays the violin and composes.
Amy King
Ph.D. in Music Theory and Cognition
amyking2020@u.northwestern.edu
Amy King is a 3rd-year PhD student in Music Theory and Cognition at Northwestern University with a certificate in Cognitive Sciences. Her current research focuses on musical communication and culture in Disney animated musicals with other interests including intersections of music and language, music and emotion, and corpus studies. She currently holds an Editorial Assistant position for Music Theory Online and engages in public music theory. Prior to her PhD studies, Amy received her Master of Music in Music Theory from Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Arts in Piano Performance and English Literature from High Point University. Her master’s thesis, “Sounds of Poetry in Britten’s ‘Death, be not proud’”—which she also presented at various conferences—combines her love of poetry with musical sound, meaning, and interpretation.
Alexandra Gilbert Rudy
Ph.D. in Music Education
alexandragilbert2029@u.northwestern.edu
Alexandra Gilbert Rudy is a first-year PhD student in Music Education from Davidsonville, Maryland. She holds a Bachelor of Music in Flute Performance and a Bachelor of Music Education from the University of Maryland where she was identified as a member of the Maryland Medallion Society, an organization which recognizes the top twenty graduating seniors at the university each academic year. She also holds a Master of Music in Music Education from Ithaca College in upstate New York. Prior to attending Northwestern University, Alexandra served as the Director of Bands at Annapolis High School, conducting the Concert Band, Marching Band, Pit Orchestra, and Pep Band while also teaching several general music courses. As a doctoral student, her academic interests include engagement and motivation in the ensemble setting, the accessibility of music education, multilingual learners, women in music, and the role of music administrations in public school systems.
Emily Schwitzgebel
Ph.D. in Music Theory and Cognition
emilyschwitzgebel2025@u.northwestern.edu
Emily Schwitzgebel’s current research focuses on expectation in music, with intersections in music and emotion, music and language, and uses of computational modeling. She has presented at conferences held by the Society for Music Perception and Cognition and the Northeast Music Cognition Group, as well as at the annual Music and Informatics interest group meeting hosted by the Society for Music Theory. Prior to her studies at Northwestern, Emily earned a Bachelor of Music in Music Theory and Composition from the College of Wooster, and a Master of Music in Music Theory from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. A strong advocate for interdisciplinary research, she aims to engage with several fields of study, drawing on her research expertise to bridge the gap between scholarship and pedagogy.
Victoria Smith
Ph.D. in Music Education
victoriasmith2026@u.northwestern.edu
Victoria Smith is a 3rd year Ph.D. student in music education at Northwestern University, with an interdisciplinary certificate in Cognitive Sciences. She holds a Bachelor’s of Music in Instrumental Performance from California State University, Stanislaus and a Master’s of Music in Music Education from the University of the Pacific, where her research focused on the influences of mariachi on student attainment, achievement, and engagement in school and at home. During her time at UOP, she served as Dr. Ruth Brittin’s Graduate Research Assistant, where she received the “Women of Distinction” award for her work with at-risk students and in gender equality. Prior to moving to Chicago to attend Northwestern, Victoria taught music for sixteen years in California and Washington states. Currently, she serves as the Music Director of Mariachi NU; a student-run performance ensemble focusing on mariachi music. Victoria’s academic interests include topics in self-evaluation and self-regulation abilities of adolescent musicians, gender preferences in instrument selections, culturally responsive practices in music and world music pedagogy, and research scholarship in the area of mariachi music education.
Emily Warkentin
Ph.D. in Music Theory and Cognition
emilywarkentin2029@u.northwestern.edu
Emily Warkentin is from Dripping Springs, Texas. She holds a BA in Music and Psychology from Trinity University. Her research strives to meld cognitive and linguistic perspectives with musical analysis to explore musical meaning in childhood, perception and learning, and late-life memory. Her undergraduate work included a children’s language research publication in Brain Sciences Journal and a senior thesis on the prominence of the Ziffersystem—a numerical music notation—in 18th-19th century Russian Mennonite choral communities. An active pianist, composer, and choral singer, Emily fuels her research interests with a deep love for musical creativity and community engagement