Music, Literature, and the Health Humanities (2023)
I explore the field of health humanities: the interdisciplinary study of medicine and the arts. My research aims to contribute to recent efforts by scholars to fill a gap in the health humanities centering on the relation between music and health. First, I propose a reflection on the representation of illness in music and the applicability of musical knowledge and performance to medicinal contexts. Second, I discuss the central role that close reading plays in health humanities. I conclude arguing that by translating close reading into a form of attentive listening in medical practice, health humanities scholars echo insights from music studies in their work.
Salsa’s Fluid Position in Popular Culture (2022)
Focusing on Panamanian salsa icon Rubén Blades, I explore the ways in which salsa has served as an anthem for the often marginalized Latin American community, combining dynamic sounds with socially conscious lyrics — while at the same time, salsa stars such as Blades have benefited from the same materialism and capitalism they bemoan in their lyrics.
Reinterpreting the Classics (2022)
I explore the ways in which Lili Boulanger’s opera Faust et Hélène reinterprets Goethe’s classic play through a feminist lens.
The Philosophy of Music (2022)
Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the world’s eminent 19th-century philosophers, idolized music, considering it a sort of philosophy. According to him, both music and philosophy are means of investigating the world and the human condition. This paper seeks to shed light on how music and philosopher reflect and inspire each other. It explores two pairs of philosophers and composers: Arthur Schopenhauer, who heavily influenced Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, and Friedrich Nietzsche, who inspired Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra. Both examples show how music is a versatile means of expression capable of evoking abstract ideas, ranging from existentialism to metaphysics.
The Cambodian Genocide (2022)
In the summer of 2022, I participated in a community service and research project in Cambodia. Our research paper explores the ways in which the U.S. can learn from the Cambodian Genocide as it seeks to preserve a democratic society today. The Cambodian Genocide reminded the U.S. of the flaws of communism. Indeed, America prides itself on being a democracy. And yet it has often failed to adhere to its lofty ideals, whether that be intervention in Cambodia or a plethora of challenges today: misinformation caused by divisive social media, national apathy, an unreasonable entrenchment in the past, and excessive patriotism. Education can be a powerful tool to foster empathy and unite our country against its myriad threats. It expands our worldviews and teaches us empathy, communication, and humility. In this way, it combats apathy, promotes knowledge, makes us flexible thinkers, and shows us the vastness of the world in comparison to our country.
The Language of Music: A Study of Four Twin Masterworks (2021)
Music and literature are both poignant ways of expressing emotions, of exploring the basest vices and redemptive virtues of human nature, of seeing life not as it is but as it should be. It is no surprise, then, that historically, writers have influenced classical music composers. The four twin works I investigated were: Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote that inspired Richard Strauss’s eponymous tone poem; Henri Cazalis’s “Danse Macabre” that inspired Camille Saint-Saëns’s eponymous tone poem; Stephen Mallarme’s “L'apres Midi d'une faune,” a poem which served as the basis for Claude Debussy's orchestral prelude “Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune”; Aloysius Bertrand’s “Ondine,” the first of three poems in his collection Gaspard de la Nuit — Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot that inspired Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit.
Astrophysics Research (2020)
In the summer of 2020, I researched the variable star XZ Cyg. I published photometric data of the star to the American Association of Variable Star Observers and also presented my research.