The University of Washington School of Music announces the appointments of new faculty in Ethnomusicology and Music History for Autumn 2023. John-Carlos Perea joins the faculty in September 2023 as Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology and Mark Rodgers as Assistant Teaching Professor in Music History.
"We are grateful to our Deans in the College of Arts and Sciences for their help in making possible these appointments,” says Joël-François Durand, director of the School of Music. “We are very fortunate, indeed, to add John-Carlos Perea to our Ethnomusicology faculty. His musicianship and research bring new dimensions to the range of musical traditions our students and faculty explore here at the School of Music. Mark Rodgers has already proven himself as a committed and innovative educator in our Music History program over the past several years, and we are pleased to retain him. Both of these excellent scholars have much to offer our students, and we are excited to include them among our faculty.”
A Grammy winning multi-instrumentalist and recording artist, John-Carlos Perea is an electric bassist, singer, cedar flutist, composer, and ethnomusicologist. He currently serves as Chair and Associate Professor of American Indian Studies in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. In 2022-23, Perea has served as Visiting Researcher, Composer, and Performer (2022-23) at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) to develop a musician-specific augmented performance with voice, cedar flute, drum, and emerging technologies. His research interests include jazz and improvised music performance and composition, urban American Indian lived experiences and cultural productions, music technologies, recording and archiving practices, social constructions of "noise," Native and African American jazz cultures, and the Creek and Kaw saxophonist Jim Pepper. In April 2019, he was recognized by the San Francisco Arts Commission’s American Indian Initiative for his musical contribution “to reclaim space, to challenge false narratives, and to reimagine public art from the perspective of Indigenous Peoples.”
Rodgers, a lecturer on the Music History faculty since 2019, earned his PhD at Yale University and previously taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. An innovative teacher with special interests in creative course design, hands-on learning experiences, and inclusive classroom environments, Rodgers focuses on three areas in his teaching and research: Medieval and Renaissance music, labor, and birdsong. Working with students in his Music and Labor course, he leads the oral history project Musical Work in the Time of COVID-19 in collaboration with the Labor Archives of Washington. Rodgers also teaches a course called Music, Birdsong, and the Limits of the Human, which includes an integral “fieldwork” component, in the School of Music and the Interdisciplinary Honors Program. In his new position, he will continue teaching Medieval and Renaissance music in the music history core and the graduate-level Seminar in Methods of Music Research, alongside 100-level courses. His introductory courses include the popular MUSIC 185: The Concert Season, which introduces non-majors to music at UW through concert attendance.