With the conclusion of the spring semester graudate students Codee Spinner, Miranda Sousa, and  Xinyang Wang were recognized for the strength of their work during this academic year.

Doctoral Candidate Codee Spinner was awarded the Don O. Franklin Prize in Musicology for her paper “Girl Group Melancholia: Race in 1960s Lament.” The selection committee noted that Spinner’s paper, “impressively contextualizes lament in [its] case studies from a number of different perspectives." Spinner was also named a Public Humanities Summer Fellow by Pitt’s Humanities Center. The fellowship will provide her the opportunity to work with the Special Collections at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Musicology graduate student Miranda Sousa was named Outstanding Presenter for the 2019 Grad Expo, an event featuring presentations from across the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Sousa’s paper “Pabllo Vittar, Drag Queen: Performing Subversion of Desire in Brazilian Dance Music” analyzes video clips of Brazilian drag queen singer Pabllo Vittar, and examines how her non-camp impersonation of feminine stereotypes, such as the femme fatale or the girl next door, subvert gender binaries and notions of heterosexual desire in Brazilian Dance Music.

Doctoral Candidate Xinyang Wang won the music department’s Dead Elf Music Prize for composition. An anonymous panel selected Wang’s composition, a work for full orchestra titled Gan-Jiang Mo-Ye.

Congratulations to Codee, Miranda, and Xinyang on their outstanding work this year!