Megan E. Hill, Ph. D.
- Managing Editor, Head Researcher & Writer
Megan E. Hill, Ph.D. is an ethnomusicologist, educator, and music editor. Before becoming involved with Music by Black Composers, she completed a Ph.D. in Musicology with an Ethnomusicological Emphasis at the University of Michigan.
As MBC’s Managing Editor, Head Researcher & Writer, Dr. Hill is the researcher, content writer, and project manager of Music by Black Composers repertoire collection publications and all other satellite projects. She has played a central role in the creation of the MBC violin series, its series of the complete keyboard works of Joseph Bologne, and now its nascent flute series. She also researches, creates, and maintains all of MBC’s extensive online materials.
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 national and international conferences throughout North America, in China, and in Taiwan. Dr. Hill 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), Dr. Hill 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.
