Anna Nekola earned her B.A. at St. Olaf College, her M.M. in oboe performance at Wichita State University, where she studied with Emily Pailthorpe, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
Anna researches music and culture, paying particular attention to musical epistemologies, disputes over musical taste and moral value, and questions about how music is embedded in systems of cultural power and politics.
Her article, “Teaching Americans to be International Citizens: World Music and Dance on Television’s Omnibus” Journal of American Music (2019) expands our understanding of international musical flows in the twentieth century, while also calling attention to the role of private non-governmental foundations in shaping global politics.
Anna is also interested in musicalized spaces and how they communicate non-verbally, a topic she explores in “Congregational Music as ’Phatic Communication’: Affect, Atmosphere, and Relational Ways of Listening,” published in The Yale Journal of Music & Religion 8.1 (2022).
Additional work includes Congregational Music Making and Community in a Mediated Age (Ashgate, 2015), co-edited with Tom Wagner, and chapters in Oxford Handbook of Community Singing (forthcoming), Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives (2021), and The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities (2016).
She has authored entries in the Grove Dictionary of American Music, the Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States, and the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology.
