2012 Feminist Working Group organizers

Daphne A. Brooks is professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University where she teaches courses on African-American literature and culture, performance studies, critical gender studies, and popular music culture. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP), winner of the The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR and Jeff Buckley's Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women and Sound Subcultures--from Minstrelsy through the New Millennium (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).  She is the author of numerous articles on race, gender, performance and popular music culture such as “This Voice Which Is Not One: Amy Winehouse Sings the Ballad of Sonic Blue(s)face Culture” in Women and Performance; “The Write to Rock: Racial Mythologies, Feminist Theory, and the Pleasures of Rock Music Criticism” in Women and Music; and “‘All That You Can't Leave Behind’: Surrogation & Black Female Soul Singing in the Age of Catastrophe” in Meridians. Brooks is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell (Universal A&R, 2010), winner of the 2011 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia (Sony, 2011).

Daphne Carr is a publisher, editor, music writer, and ethnomusicologist living in New York City. She is the publisher of Feedback Press, home of the Best Music Writing series. She was series editor for the title between 2006-2011 at Da Capo Press.  She is the author of Nine Inch Nails Pretty Hate Machine (Continuum 2011), and a contributor to the books Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs (Da Capo 2007) and Listen Again (Duke University Press 2007). She is currently pursuing a PhD in ethnomusicology at Columbia University and runs a listserv for women music writers, Girl Group.

Sarah Dougher is a composer, musician and educator living in Portland, Oregon. Her musical work is focused on composition for, and co-direction of the Flash Choir, a free, non-audition community choir of approximately 30. She also writes music for her solo project, and collaborates with friends on the hootenanny band, the Stumptown Family Ramblers. She has released albums on K, Kill Rock Stars, Mr. Lady, and her own label, Cherchez La Femme. Sarah teaches at Portland State University in the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department, as well as in the University Studies department. Her academic interests focus around issues related to homeless youth and food insecurity, as well as gender and popular music.

Tavia Nyong'o's research interests include the intersections of race and sexuality, visual art and performance, and cultural history. He teaches courses on black performance, the history of the body, and subcultural performance. His book, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), investigates musical, aesthetic, and political practices that conjoined blackness and whiteness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the web editor of Social Text.

Caroline Polk O'Meara is a musicologist and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches in the Butler School of Music. She specializes in American music of the twentieth century, including art and popular music. O'Meara received her PhD and master's degrees in musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and graduated with honors from Princeton University.  O'Meara's current scholarly activities include her book project, Musical Mappings: Late Twentieth-Century American Music in New York City, which is about how New Yorkers on the urban periphery used music to imagine and create a place for themselves within a city putatively the core of American musical and social life. It includes chapters on downtown New York, punk rock, hip-hop, and contemporary classical music. Other research areas include noise and liveness in Austin, Texas. She has published articles in Popular Music and American Music, and presented research at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, Society for American Music, Society for Ethnomusicology, and American Studies Association. In 2011, she organized and moderated a conference seminar on the topic "Music and Place" for the Society for American Music; she has also written the entry on "Music and Place" for the Grove Dictionary of American Music, second edition. She is currently the treasurer for the International Association of Popular Music, United States branch.

Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. She writes for NPR's music news blog, The Record, and she can be heard on NPR's newsmagazines and music programs. Powers served as chief pop music critic at the Los Angeles Times from 2006 until she joined NPR. Prior to the Los Angeles Times, she was senior critic at Blender and senior curator at Experience Music Project. From 1997 to 2001 Powers was a pop critic at The New York Times and before that worked as a senior editor at the Village Voice. Powers began her career working as an editor and columnist at San Francisco Weekly. Her writing extends beyond blogs, magazines and newspapers. Powers co-wrote Tori Amos: Piece By Piece, with Amos, which was published in 2005. In 1999, Power's book Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America was published. She was the editor, with Evelyn McDonnell, of the 1995 book Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Rap, and Pop and the editor of Best Music Writing 2010.