AMS LGBTQ Study Group

About Us

The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Study Group is a recognized special interest group of the American Musicological Society. Our objectives include increasing awareness of sexuality and music in the academy, promoting contact among music scholars working in LGBTQ studies, and establishing a forum for the presentation of such research. We also intend to provide an environment in which to examine the process of coming out in academia, and to contribute to a positive political climate for affirmative action and LGBTQ curricula.

We convene annually at the national meeting of the AMS and host an evening session and party. These sessions include invited guest speakers and cutting-edge graduate student research. Each year we present the Philip Brett Award which honors exceptional work in LGBTQ music studies.

Board Members

Tiffany Naiman
Co-chair (2021-23)

Tiffany Naiman is the Director of Music Industry Programs and an Assistant Teaching Professor at UCLA’s Herb Alpert School of Music, as well as a lecturer in the Musicology department. She is a scholar of popular music, temporality, and disability studies. She currently serves as co-chair of the LGBTQ Study Group of the American Musicological Society. Tiffany has developed specialization as a David Bowie scholar and her work is published in Blackstar Rising, Purple Rain (Duke University Press, 2023), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis (Bloomsbury, 2019), David Bowie: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2015), and Enchanting David Bowie: Space/Time/Body/Memory (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Maria Murphy
Co-chair (2022-24)

Maria Murphy is the Associate Director at the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work examines the relationship between music technologies and body politics through multimedia performance art, American experimentalism, and aesthetic activism in the 20th and 21st centuries. Maria is also invested in creating spaces for hands-on and public-facing research. She is the host of Gender Jawn, a podcast about the politics, performances, and pedagogies of gender & sexuality and, as part of her research practice, she has performed as her own clone, a submissive masc-4-masc daddy, an abstract dandelion powered by fans, and a 19th-century Irish immigrant sex worker.

Lee Kimura Tyson
Member-at-large (2022-24)

Lee Kimura Tyson (he/they) is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities in Leadership Learning Series and the Department of Music at Case Western Reserve University. Their research and teaching center on gender, race, and voice in U.S. popular music and culture, with a particular focus on trans and queer musical expression and digital media cultures. Their current work examines trans vocal experimentation and ideas of authenticity in hyperpop music. Tyson holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University, an M.M. from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. from the University of Nevada, Reno.

Kerry O’Brien
Member-at-large (2021-22)

Kerry O’Brien is a musicologist who specializes in experimental music, minimalism, and countercultural spirituality. She has taught at Yale University, the University of Washington, and Indiana University (where she earned her PhD in musicology), and currently teaches at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Her writings have appeared in the Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung, Tempo, the Chicago Reader, The New York Times, The New Yorker online, and the edited collection Rethinking Reich. Her book On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement, co-edited with William Robin, is forthcoming with the University of California Press.

Louis Niebur
(2022-24)