Historical Musicology
PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
Stephanie Vander Wel has served on the faculty at the University at Buffalo's Music Department since 2008. Her research interests focus on vocality and the embodied performances of gender, class, and region in country music. She teaches courses on American Music before 1945, Women in Music, Methodologies of Musicology, Music in the 1960s, Music and Place, Popular Music and Gender, and Experimental Music.
Vander Wel's articles and reviews have appeared in Musical Quarterly, Journal of the Society for American Music, Southern Space, and others.Her book, entitled The Singing Voices of Hillbilly Maidens and Cowboys' Sweethearts: Country Music and the Gendering of Class, 1930s-1950s, will be published by the University of Illinois Press, Music in American Life series. She also served as a contributor editor for the Grove Dictionary of American Music, Second Edition(Oxford University Press, 2013). Her recent work includes two forthcoming articles: "The Singing Voice in Country Music" that will appear in the Oxford Handbook in Country Music, edited by Travis Stimeling (University of Oxford Press); and "Weeping and Flamboyant Men: Webb Pierce and the Campy Theatrics of Country Music" in Pink Cowboys: Progressive Thought in Country Music, edited by Mark Jackson (University of Massachusetts Press).
In September of 2015, Vander Wel was invited to deliver a lecture, entitled "Rose Maddox's Roadhouse Vocality and the California Sound of 1950s Rockabilly and Honky-Tonk," at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum/American Musicological Society Lecture Series. She has presented her work at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, Experimental Music Project, International Country Music Conference, Society for American Music, Feminist Theory and Music, and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.