Staff
CBMR General E-mail
cbmr.contact@colum.edu
Reference E-mail
cbmrref@colum.edu
Administration
Monica Hairston, Ph.D., Executive Director
mhairston@colum.edu
Hairston is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at New York University; her dissertation topic is the New York Nightclub Café Society, leftist politics, jazz, and gender, with an emphasis on the music of Hazel Scott. She received her M.M. in music literature from the University of Georgia and taught French horn and music history at Morris Brown College. She also has taught on women and music, blues, and jazz history at Ramapo College, Hofstra University, and New York University. While at NYU, she was awarded a Ford Foundation Graduate Fellowship, the Joan R. Heller Dissertation Prize, and the Patricia Dunn Lehrman Graduate Fellowship. Her areas of interest include African-American popular music, jazz (particularly of the 1940s), women’s music cultures, and feminist theory and research methods. Hairston has also been working with David Bury and Associates, a New York firm that specializes in fundraising and development for arts organizations.
Morris A. Phibbs, M.M., Deputy Director
mphibbs@colum.edu
Development and fundraising activities; conferences; public programs; job postings.
Phibbs served the Center from 1989 to 1998 as Coordinator of Programs and was responsible for coordinating and managing all public programs, including local meetings, seminars, and colloquia, national and international conferences, and performance activities. Phibbs came to the Center from the College Music Society, where he was manager of membership services and managing editor of College Music Symposium; Directory of Music Faculties in College and Universities: U.S. and Canada; CMS Proceedings: The National and Regional Meetings; the CMS Reports series; and the Music Faculty Vacancy List. Phibbs holds an M.M. degree in music history and literature from West Virginia University and has done doctoral work in choral literature and conducting.
Raj Mago, B.A., Accountant
rmago@colum.edu
Memberships; subscription fulfillment; questions regarding web orders; gifts, pledges, and donations.
Mago previously worked at Northrop Grumman in Rolling Meadows for fifteen years in various capacities, including in finance, general ledger accounting, accounts payable, cashier, account analysis, and budget planning and Analysis.
Linda Hunter, B.A., Administrative Assistant
lhunter@colum.edu
Receptionist
Hunter received her B.A. from Columbia College Chicago in art, entertainment and media management with a minor in music, has completed some graduate courses at Governors State University, and has worked primarily in post-production recording studios.
Research and Publications
Kenneth Bilby, Ph.D., Director of Research
kbilby@colum.edu
Design and development of research programs and conferences.
Bilby earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and his M.A. in anthropology from Wesleyan University. Bilby has undertaken anthropological and ethnomusicological research in several parts of the Caribbean, including Jamaica, French Guiana, Suriname, Dominica, St. Vincent, Belize, and the Bahamas. His extensive fieldwork with Maroon peoples in both Jamaica and the Guianas has resulted in numerous articles, book chapters, and other publications. Bilby was a Guggenheim Fellow (2004–2005), Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2003), Visiting Professor of Music and Anthropology at Bard College (2000–2002), and Curator (1991–1992, 1997) and Research Associate (1993–2007) with the Smithsonian Institution. He received the Caribbean Studies Association Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship in 1996 for the book Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (which he co-authored with Peter Manuel and Michael Largey), and the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association in 2006 for his book True-Born Maroons. Bilby also received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant (1993–1995), was a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellow (1990–1991), and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the CBMR (2003–2004).
Horace Maxile Jr., Ph.D., Associate Director of Research
hmaxile@colum.edu
Maxile holds a Ph.D. in musicology, with a music theory emphasis, from Louisiana State University. His research interests include musical semiotics, jazz analysis, and concert music by African-American composers. Among his publications are articles in Perspectives of New Music and The American Music Research Center Journal. He has presented papers at a number of conferences and symposia including the Society for Music Theory, Society for American Music, Society for Ethnomusicology, and The International Symposium on Composition in Africa and the Diaspora.
Laura Haefner, B.A., Manager of Publications and Membership
lhaefner@colum.edu
Editing and production of CBMR publications; reprint permissions; advertising in Black Music Research Journal; memberships.
Haefner received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and has worked in publishing for several years, most recently at Taylor & Francis Publishers in Philadelphia. She also is an occasional freelance copy editor.
Library and Archives
For reference assistance please send your request to:
cbmrref@colum.edu
Suzanne Flandreau, M.A., M.A.L.S., Head Librarian and Archivist. sflandreau@colum.edu
Management of the CBMR Library and Archives; donations to the CBMR Library; reference librarian.
Flandreau has an M.A. in library science from the University of Michigan and an M.A. in history from the University of Mississippi. She came to the CBMR in 1990 to establish the Library and Archives. She has presented and published papers and articles on archival topics, blues and blues musicians, and copyright issues. She currently serves as Treasurer of the Society for Ethnomusioclogy and represents SEM on the National Recording Preservation Board at the Library of Congress. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Ethnographic Thesaurus and of the Board of Directors of Chicago's Black Metropolis Research Consortium.
Andrew Leach, M.S., Librarian and Archivist
aleach@colum.edu
Reference librarian; library instruction; collection development of sound and video recordings.
Leach holds degrees in music and library science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has worked in music libraries and archives since 1993. He is a member of the Music Library Association, the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and the Society of American Archivists. Leach has served on several professional committees and currently serves as Coordinator of MLA's Black Music Collections Roundtable. He has presented papers at conferences of the Music Library Association, the Society for American Music, and the American Library Association, and he has contributed articles and reviews to several publications. He is also an active musician.
Janet Harper, M.L.I.S., Catalog Librarian
jharper@colum.edu
Harper has a master's degree in library science with a concentration in technical services from Wayne State University. An experienced cataloger, she has worked in academic, medical, and automotive libraries and archives and specializes in the cataloging of African-American–related materials.
Part-Time Staff
Melanie Zeck, M.L.I.S., M.M., Research Assistant
mzeck@colum.edu
Trained as a music librarian, Zeck provides fact finding and fact checking for a variety of CBMR publications and projects. Her individual research focuses on woodwind and string music from the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially that of the Chevalier de Saint-Georges and Johann Hummel. Her recent paper on the Chevalier, given at the North Lakeside Cultural Center in Chicago, was part of a program sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Council. She also gave a flute recital featuring the music of Francois-Joseph Gossec, the Chevalier's composition instructor. Zeck is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the history and theory of music at the University of Chicago.
Peter Shultz, A.B., Webmaster
pshultz@colum.edu
Development of content for and maintenance of website.
When not at the CBMR, Shultz is a Ph.D. candidate in music theory at the University of Chicago. His work on the CBMR website and his dissertation research both draw on a longstanding interest in computers, which began in 1986 with an Amiga 500. He received his A.B. in music in 2001 from Princeton University.