Dr. Guarino is an ethnomusicologist working at the intersection of contemplative studies, ethnography, and religious life. She specializes in contemplative inquiry and pedagogy with a focus on the relationship between religious and musical ways of knowing, particularly the transformative experiences of mysticism, contemplation, and expressive culture. Her book, Listen with the Ear of the Heart: Music and Monastery Life at Weston Priory, explores these topics in the context of a Benedictine monastery while engaging broader epistemological and ontological questions that get to the heart of how we know what we know and how we become/enact who we are when we participate in liturgical music.
Mary Louise (Mel) Bringle is a Professor of Philosophy and Religion and coordinator of interdisciplinary studies at Brevard College in Brevard, NC; she is also a ruling elder at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Hendersonville, NC. Her Ph.D. in practical and pastoral theology is from Emory University. An award-winning hymn writer whose original texts and translations appear in the hymnals of numerous denominations in North America and Scotland, she has served as President of The Hymn Society in the US and Canada and as chair of the Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song, responsible for creating the hymnal Glory to God. In the summer of 2020, she was named a Fellow of the Hymn Society.
Melvin L. Butler is an associate professor in the Department of Musicology and the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. His work centers on music, religion, and cultural identity in the African diaspora. He is the author of Island Gospel: Pentecostal Music and Identity in Jamaica and the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2019). His second book, Heated Worship: Music and the Cultural Politics of Transcendence in Haiti, is under contract with Oxford University Press.
Nathan B. Kruse is Associate Professor of Music Education at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He teaches courses in research methods, the sociology of music education, vernacular music, and classroom guitar. He also conducts the Adult Orchestra at The Music Settlement, one of Cleveland’s oldest community music schools. Kruse’s research interests include adult music education and lifespan learning, ethnographic traditions of community music, and vernacular music approaches.
Tammy L. Kernodle is an internationally-recognized scholar and musician that teaches and researches in the areas of African American music and gender and music. She has worked closely with a number of educational programs including The American Jazz Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture, NPR, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the BBC. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, anthologies ,and online platforms including NPR's Turning the Table Series and a recent digital exhibit of jazz materials at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Kernodle is the author of biography Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, served as Associate Editor of the three-volume Encyclopedia of African American Music and the Editorial team for the revision of the Grove Dictionary of American Music. She has appeared in a number of award-winning documentaries including Girls in the Band, The Lady Who Swings the Band and Miles Davis: The Birth of Cool. A trained pianist and choral director, Kernodle has worked with choirs across the country and served as Minister of Music for over 20 years in the Cincinnati, OH area. Dr. Tammy L. Kernodle currently serves as the President of the Society for American Music and is Professor of Musicology at Miami University.
Geraldine Latty – encourager, songwriter, performer, worship leader, vocal coach and choir director. Her musical worship journey has taken her from Australia to the Albert Hall, from street parties to cathedrals, from singing with teenage mums to radio and TV appearances, from leading with a choir at the local pub to countless ‘Sing Gospel’ community choir sessions around the country. Her music fuses styles like Soul, Gospel, Blues, World, Jazz, Classical and Rock. She also lectures on the Music and Theology degree program at London School of Theology. Geraldine has worked with over 100 choir groups in the UK and abroad including Germany and Malaysia. Her extensive experience with choirs includes being an associate of the Royal School of Church Music as a choir animateur as well as coaching university gospel choirs and prepping choirs for albums.
Paul Vasile (he/him/his) is the Executive Director of Music that Makes Community and a freelance church musician, consultant, and composer based in St. Louis, Missouri. He also serves as the Director of Music at Eden Theological Seminary. A multitalented musician and dynamic worship leader, he is committed to building, renewing, and re-shaping faith communities through singing and liturgy.
Kay Norton, Professor of Musicology at ASU’s School of Music, writes about U. S. sacred vocal music and is currently at work on a monograph about Sallie Martin. She has published articles in Journal of the Society for American Music, American Music, and the Hymn, among other journals, and has written monographs on an 1810 Georgia hymnal and composer Normand Lockwood. Her 2016 book, Singing and Wellbeing: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Proof (Routledge) draws together musicology, anthropology, philosophy, medical history, psychology of music, and neuroscience to argue the centrality of the melodious voice in human experience. Kay is an editorial board member of the Journal for the Society of American Music, Journal of the Center for Popular Music, and the Sounding Spirit publication and digitization of Southern sacred music initiative at Emory University. Her co-edited volume with Esther Morgan-Ellis, Oxford Handbook of Community Singing, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Pete Ward teaches and Durham University and at NLA University College Bergen. He is the Co-Director of the Ecclesiology and Ethnography Network. His work on Contemporary Christian Worship in the UK was published as ’Selling Worship’ (2003). His current research is focussed on the Religious and Spiritual dimensions of Bluegrass and Old Time Music. This builds on his 2020 book ‘Celebrity Worship.’ He lives in Hexham and is involved in the local music scene.
Tom Beaudoin teaches theological and religious studies at Fordham University in New York City. He specializes in practical theology, popular music, and religious/nonreligious affiliation/disaffiliation.
Tala Jarjour is a scholar of music, religion and anthropology who is particularly curious about connections between politics, cultural practice, as well as religious life and belief. Her academic research has a focus on musics from the Middle East and the Arab world, in the region and beyond. Dr Jarjour’s academic training and teaching include anthropology, ethnomusicology, historical musicology, violin performance, theology and psychology. As a Cambridge Gates Scholar, she wrote her PhD on Syriac chant in the Syrian city of Aleppo. She is currently Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and Associate Fellow of the Yale College. Dr Jarjour’s writing and research interests include emotion, identity, aesthetics, cultural heritage, minority, society and performance, survival, power, conflict and trauma, peace studies as well as migration and integration. Her writings appear regularly in cultural and international mass media concerned with the Middle East, as well as in academic outlets. She wrote Sense and Sadness, Syriac Chant in Aleppo, a book published by Oxford University Press. Dr Jarjour consults locally and cross-nationally for ecclesiastical, interreligious, educational, nonprofit, as well as private and public sector entities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and the Middle East.