Megan E. Hill, Ph. D.
- Managing Editor, Head Researcher & Writer
Megan E. Hill, Ph.D., is an ethnomusicologist, educator, writer, and editor. She completed a Ph.D. in Musicology with an Ethnomusicological Emphasis at the University of Michigan in 2016.
As MBC’s Managing Editor, Head Researcher & Writer, Dr. Hill is the principal researcher, content writer, and project manager of Music by Black Composers repertoire collection publications and all other satellite projects.
Dr. Hill’s research specializations include Western classical music of Africa and the African diaspora, music in contemporary Japan, and American popular music. She has presented on behalf of MBC at the Midwest Clinic (2018), and has presented her own research at the 3rd International Council for Traditional Music Forum (Beijing, 2018), the Music Integration and Innovation Symposium (Beijing, 2018), the Society for Ethnomusicology’s annual conference (Denver, 2016; Washington, DC, 2017), the Association for Asian Studies (Toronto, 2017), Stony Brook University’s Periods and Waves Conference (2016), Boston University’s Sound and Bodies in the World Conference (2015), and the Inter-Asia Popular Music Conference (Taiwan Normal University, 2012). She has been an invited guest lecturer for courses and symposia at the University of Michigan and the University of Toledo. She was the recipient of the inaugural William P. Malm Prize for Outstanding Student Writing (2010) from the Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan, the Glenn McGeoch Memorial Scholarship in Musicology Pedagogy (2016) from the School of Music, Theatre & Dance at the University of Michigan, and the Louise E. Cuyler Prize in Musicology (2016) from the University of Michigan’s Musicology Department. Her dissertation field research was supported by a Dissertation Fellowship (2011-2012) from the Japan Foundation.
In her dissertation, “Asakusa Ondo: Soundscape Agency, Montage, and Place in a Dynamic Tokyo Neighborhood” (2016), she offered a theoretical framework for analyzing and understanding the ways that people make sense of sound, music, and place in dense, diverse urban environments. She has broad research interests that intersect with issues of music, place, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of human identity and experience in everyday life.
Her article, “Asakusa-Tsugaru-jamisen: Musical Place Making and Conceptual Blending in 21st-Century Tokyo,” appeared in the Journal of the Society for Asian Music in Summer/Fall 2019.
