About My Research
In my varied research projects, I seek to understand music’s relation to identity and community formation. Grounded in historic, ethnographic, and participatory approaches, my research often engages with the potentials and limitations of music to bring about social change. Currently a PhD Candidate in Ethnomusicology at Boston University, I also research, write, and teach about Music Education and choral music, and I curate and produce collaborative, publicly oriented research and performance projects which strive to bring communities together through shared experiences with music and sound.
Dissertation Project
My dissertation project elucidates the politics of development in contemporary Cambodia through exploration of embodied practices including music and dance. Analyzing expressive practice against a backdrop of widespread development and anxiety about cultural loss, I explore how artists are negotiating their identities as simultaneously inheritors of traditions and creators of new sounds, movements, and ontologies. With a particular focus on women’s practices, my project illuminates how Cambodian artists are responding to and precipitating development and social change.
I am grateful to the Center for Khmer Studies, Society for Ethnomusicology, Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Boston University Arts Initiative, and Boston University Graduate Student Organization for their support of my 18-month period of dissertation fieldwork.
My dissertation writing is being supported by an AAUW American Fellowship; it’s an honor to have been selected for AAUW’s largest and oldest funding program, which has supported female scholars since 1888.
Engaged and Public Scholarship
I am committed to developing collaborative research and teaching projects that are meaningful and relevant to the people and communities with which I work. As an Engaged Scholarship Course Fellow at Harvard University in 2017, I had the opportunity to dialogue with other researchers and students about the ethics and practicalities of such community-oriented, public-facing scholarship, and I continue to work towards the development of best practices in and through my research.
I also strive to present my research in formats that are accessible to a broad audience within and beyond the academy; my writing has been featured in Southeast Asia Globe, my work has been profiled in numerous Cambodian media outlets including Khmer Times newspaper and Popular Magazine’s “តោះមើល” web series, and I have presented my research at Phnom Penh’s popular Nerd Night presentation series.
Current and recent projects include:
សូរស្ត្រី | Her Sounds (2019) is a multimedia project documenting the voices and gestures of Cambodian women musicians and dancers through sound and image. Produced in collaboration with photographer Neak Sophal, our August 2019 exhibition at Mirage Contemporary Art Space showcases the strength and creativity of Cambodia’s women artists through images and 18 accompanying audio documentaries available to the public at www.hersounds.org. This project is supported by the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Sonic Cambodia (2019) is a web-based platform I created to document Cambodian audible culture for a broad audience. Presenting raw music, sounds, and images from performance and daily life in Cambodia, the project aims to provoke questions and understanding about what it means to live and hear like a local. www.soniccambodia.org.
Let’s Make a Better World: Stories and Songs by Jane Sapp (2019) is a publication from Brandeis University Press chronicling the life, work, and songs of legendary performer, music educator, and civil rights activist Jane Sapp. I produced the transcriptions for the 25 songs featured in the book, dialoguing with Ms. Sapp about the songs’ genesis and her objectives for their future in order to create scores that can function simultaneously as documentation of Jane’s creativity and virtuosic musicianship, as a practical resource for musicians and educators in the present, and as inspiration for educators to undertake their own songwriting projects in community.
BRAVE: A Concert for Gender Equity (2017) is a concert I curated and conducted with the Boston Children’s Chorus at Rockport Music (Rockport, MA) to explore issues related to gender equity. In rehearsals, the 14-18-year-old singers and I discussed the challenges facing young women throughout the world today; singers then shared their personal stories and conducted research on the status of women around the world, and I worked with the singers to weave these stories together into a cohesive script which we then used to link the songs together. Blending music, movement, and dialogue, this project aimed to engage singers and audiences in the collaborative work of reflecting, sharing, and visioning.
Visions of Angkor: Music and Dance from Cambodia and its Diaspora (2016) is a concert and panel discussion I organized at Boston University to bring three Cambodian virtuoso musicians to Boston University to collaborate with local Cambodian-American musicians and dancers and then dialogue with scholars and community activists about music and memory in post-conflict settings and in diaspora. I received a grant from the Boston University Arts Initiative to support the travel of approximately 100 Cambodian-American middle school students from Lowell Public Schools to attend the performance and tour Boston University.
And Neither Have I Wings to Fly (2014) is a publication I edited along with my colleagues André de Quadros and Jamie Hillman to showcase the poetry, prose, and artwork produced by our incarcerated students in Boston University’s Prison Education Program.
Publications
Howe, Emily, André de Quadros, Andrew Clark, and Kinh T. Vu. “The Tuning of the Music Educator: A Pedagogy of the ‘Common Good’ for the Twenty-First Century.” Humane Music Education for the Common Good, ed. Iris Yob and Estelle Jorgensen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Forthcoming.
De Quadros, André and Emily Howe. “Choral Music.” The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Music and Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2019.
De Quadros, André, Jamie Hillman, and Emily Howe, eds. And Neither Have I Wings to Fly: Empowering Song: Arts in the Boston University Prison Education Program. Boston, MA: Boston University College of Fine Arts. 2014.
Select Conference Presentations
“‘Kampuchea is Moving Forward!’: Sounding Development in Contemporary Cambodia,” 2019 Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Bloomington, IN, November 2019.
“Performing Power: Women Artists’ Perspectives on Embodiment, Sound, and Social Change in Contemporary Cambodia,” 2019 Conference of the Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies, Montreal, QC, October 2019.
“Strange Encounters of the Heard Kind: Percussion, Possession, and Borderlands in Rural Cambodian Ritual,” 2019 Boston University Graduate Conference on Religion, Boston, MA, September 2019.
“សូរស្ត្រី | Her Sounds: An Arts-Based Research Project and Exhibition about Cambodian Women Artists in Theory and Practice.” Center for Khmer Studies, Siem Reap, Cambodia, August 2019.
“Sounding Re-Generation: The Politics of Post-Conflict Performance in Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia (2017),” 2018 Meeting of the Association for Asian Performance, Boston, MA, July 2018.
“Singing Like a State: Music, Modernity, and the Projection of an Aurally Intelligible Cambodia in the Films of King-Father Norodom Sihanouk, 1966-1969,” 2017 Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Denver, CO, October 2017.
“Making Equity: Enacting Social Justice through Empowering Song,” co-presentation with André de Quadros and Kinh T. Vu, New Directions in Music Education Conference, East Lansing, MI, February 2017.
Invited Presenter, “Expanding Our Reach” Symposium, Yale International Choral Festival 2015. New Haven, CT, June 2015.
“Re-Member Me: Rebirthing the Self through Musical Practice in a U.S. Women’s Prison,” co-presentation with André de Quadros, 2014 Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting. Pittsburgh, PA, November, 2014.
Invited Panelist, “Choral Music and Social Change,” 2014 Massachusetts Music Educators Association Conference.