LAMC - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Associate Professor of English, Director of the Latino Studies Program

Job Titles:

• Staff Member of the Latin American Music

Christine Wisch is a staff member of the Latin American Music Center and adjunct lecturer at the Jacobs School of Music. She holds a bachelor's degrees in music education and Spanish from the University of Houston as well as a master's degree and doctorate in musicology from Indiana University. Her work as a musicologist focuses on nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Spanish classical music and issues of patronage, nationalism, and exoticism. She currently teaches a course on Women Musicians for the Music in General Studies Program and the Introduction to Latin American Art Music for the LAMC as part of the undergraduate minor curriculum.

Job Titles:

• Lecturer
• Lecturer in Music ( Guitar )

Daniel Duarte is lecturer in music in guitar at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He is an active guitarist, arranger, conductor and lecturer who has collected prizes in several guitar and chamber music competitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Duarte is also a multi-instrumentalist who performs on different types of guitars and as a flutist. Duarte's primary studies were with guitarist Henrique Pinto, followed by William Buonocore, Eliot Fisk and Ernesto Bitetti. He earned his D.M. at Indiana University while focusing his academic research on the topic of Multiculturalism and Guitar Music. During his doctoral studies, Duarte had his research supported by the Presser Foundation as a recipient of the outstanding graduate music student award. His academic work also lead Marshall University to award him the Joan C. Edwards Distinguished Professor of Arts award. At IU, he is the founder and director of the Guitar Ensemble, formed by twelve undergraduate and graduate students, performing fundamental repertoire related to the classical guitar tradition and various other styles while featuring original works and arrangement written specifically for the ensemble. Duarte also directs the IU All Campus Guitar Ensemble and teaches general education lectures that cover broad historical subjects related to music and guitar. At the Jacobs School of Music, he has also collaborated as director of ensembles of the Latin American Music Center. As a touring artist, Duarte is currently presenting concerts with fellow guitarist and IU faculty member Petar Jankovic. As a guitar duo, Petar and Daniel have had dozens of appearances since 2016, reaching audiences throughout the United States and abroad while featuring a modern approach to the classical guitar repertoire during concerts and master classes.

Job Titles:

• Associate Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Director of the Ethnomusicology Institute

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Anthropology

Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua filmmaker, educator, and scholar raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University and is an Assistant Professor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department and Anthropology. Her ethnographic manuscript titled Chimera Geographies: Black Feminist Borderland Performances" focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religion as a means to forge Black feminist borderlands through spiritual crossings. Her work has been published in Feminist Anthropology, NACLA, and Cultural Anthropology's Screening Room. In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a documentary filmmaker. She co-directed a film entitled Bronx Lives (2014) that explores homelessness for Latinx and African Americans in New York. Her work has been shown at MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, Good Pitch Philadelphia, and Blackstar Film Festival and she has received grants from Leeway Foundation, Independent Public Media Foundation, Velocity Fund, Scribe Foundation, Independent ornell Council for the Arts, Society for the Humanities, and Haverford College. She is also the director of the film Smile4Kime, currently in production, an autoethnographic experimental portrait about friendship, mental health, and Afro-Puerto Rican spirituality. As a part of her work in film, she co-founded a feminist filmmaking collective called Ethnocine and is a producer of the podcast Bad Feminists Making Films.

Job Titles:

• Librarian and Curator of Special Collections

Job Titles:

• Director and Academic Specialist

Job Titles:

• Editor of the Journal of Folklore Research Reviews
• Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana

John McDowell Professor Emeritus in Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Editor of the Journal of Folklore Research Reviews John McDowell is a Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. He also serves as Director of the Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team (DERT) headquartered at Indiana University. Broadly speaking his work is centered on performance and communication as well as the interplay of creativity and tradition. Geographically most of his fieldwork has been in Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Ghana. His interests include Speech play and verbal art; the corrido of Greater Mexico; music, myth, and cosmology in the Andes; ecoperformativity; commemoration; folklorization; ethnopoetics; Latin America; the United States. While a graduate student, John conducted field research with Chicano children in Austin, Texas, in connection with the Texas Children's Folklore Project, under the supervision of Richard Bauman, one of John's mentors and subsequently a colleague at Indiana University. John's assignment was to document forms of traditional verbal expression among working-class Chicano children in the Austin area. His first book, Children's Riddling (1979), traces the social and cognitive development of children through their verbal play, and won the Chicago Folklore Prize, the most prestigious honor for folkloristic books in the United States. Other publications on children's folklore followed, and in 2019, in recognition of his many scholarly contributions to the understanding of children's folklore, John was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Children's Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society. After completing graduate work, John joined the faculty of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington, and initiated a series of field stays in the Sibundoy Valley, including 1978-79 as a Fulbright-Hays Fellow, first among the Kamsá and then among the Inganos, two different but culturally similar indigenous groups. John's fieldwork in Colombia resulted in the publication of a pair of related books, Sayings of the Ancestors: The Spiritual Life of the Sibundoy Indians (1989) and "So Wise Were Our Elders": Mythic Narratives of the Kams á (1994). The former focuses upon a collection of some 200 traditional sayings widely known among the Inganos, who trace the sayings back to their ancestors, beings who lived in the remote past in a mythic time before the present world-order. The sayings have to do with the interpretation of dreams and of particular waking experiences. John describes their formal properties and relates them to Ingano cosmology, as reflected in mythology, spirit beliefs, and folk Catholicism. The companion volume, "So Wise Were Our Elders," is an account of the genesis of the cosmos as the neighboring Kamsá view it, a mythological world that before John‘s investigations was little known elsewhere. John gives the native texts in Kamsá and English, supplementing them with discussions of the Kamsá language and poetics, the cultural context of the stories, and comparative observations on the Kamsá stories in relation to other Amerindian mythologies and to European folk narratives. A third major focus of John's research has been the tradition of Mexico's popular ballad form, the corrido, which likewise has culminated in a pair of related books. Although John's fondness for Mexican culture developed on its own when he was a young man, his interest in the corrido in particular was owed to another mentor during his student days at the University of Texas, Américo Paredes, himself an author of a classic study of the genre. At Paredes's suggestion, John visited the Costa Chica region of Mexico in 1972 in search of a living ballad tradition. Later he returned to do extensive fieldwork, documenting the tradition and investigating the complex role the corrido plays there. These researches resulted in a book with the striking title, Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico's Costa Chica (2000), which includes a compact disk with audio tracks of corrido recordings. John followed up with a companion volume, ¡Corrido! The Living Ballad of Mexico's West Coast (2015), giving the verbal texts, musical scores, and historical background of over a hundred heroic ballads.

Job Titles:

• Founder

Job Titles:

• Assistant Professor in the African American
• Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies, Latino Studies

Judith Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor in the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department and the Latino Studies Program. Judith specializes in transdisciplinary approaches to Black critical theory, Afro-Latinx Studies, and Caribbean philosophical thought. Specifically, her work draws together research in Puerto Rican aesthetics and performance studies with Black studies and Black feminist theory, Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, and gender and sexuality studies. Her manuscript, titled Impositions: The Aesthetic Blackening of Puerto Rico and its Diaspora, explores works of literature, music, documentary film, and theatre and performance since the 1930s that have critiqued-and imagined alternatives to-the antiblack and heteropatriarchal violence produced through the various cultural and historical discourses of racial hybridity on the island and its diaspora. Her second book-length project titled Outlaw Performances: Reading Black Dissonance in Puerto Rican Legal Discourse, explores the performance of Blackness and race within juridical interpretations of domestic violence law in Puerto Rico. This project follows the theories and methods of Impositions from the aesthetic to the juridical realm to investigate the legal grammar of Puerto Rican domestic violence law and foregrounds the highly racialized language that drives the law's court decisions. Judith was an invited participant in the University of California Humanities Research Institute Residential Research Group Queer Hemisphere/América Queer. She was a visiting scholar in the Literature Section at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 2018-2019 and received her PhD in Culture and Theory at UC Irvine in 2019. She has published work in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Hispanófila: Ensayos de Literatura and has a forthcoming chapter in the anthology Punk: Las Américas through Intellect Books.

Loida Garza is a Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory whose dissertation focuses on Julián Carrillo's compositional works. Before starting her doctoral work at IU, she completed a MM in Music Theory at Texas State University and a BM in Music Theory from the University of Texas at Arlington. Although primarily a pianist, she enjoys playing violin in IU's Mariachi Perla del Medio Oeste. Outside of music, she likes to crochet, run, and hike and travel with her husband and pets.

Job Titles:

• Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University
• Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Gender Studies, Editor of Journal of Folklore Research

Solimar Otero is a professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and Yoruba traditional religion in folklore, literature, and ethnography. She is the author of Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World, (2010, 2013). She is also the co-editor of Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas (2013), which was selected as a finalist for the 2014 Albert J. Raboteau book prize. Dr. Otero is the recipient of a Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund grant (2013); a fellowship at the Harvard Divinity School's Women's Studies in Religion Program, (2009 to 2010); and a Fulbright award (2001). She is currently working on a book, Afrolatin@ Religious Performance: Affect and Ritual in Cuba. This project investigates how vernacular performances and narratives in Afro-Cuban religions create a layered Cuban transnationalism. Her work has also appeared in The Journal of American Folklore, Western Folklore, Africa Today, The Black Scholar, Atlantic Studies, Phoebe, and The American Journal of Psychoanalysis.

Job Titles:

• Head of the Critically Acclaimed Patois Records
• Professor of Practice ( Jazz Studies and Jazz Trombone )
• Professor of Practice in Jazz Studies and Jazz Trombone at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

Wayne Wallace is professor of practice in jazz studies and jazz trombone at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. A seven-time Grammy nominee, he is one of the most respected exponents of African American-Latin music in the world today. Wallace is known for the use of traditional forms and styles in combination with contemporary music and has earned wide critical acclaim, including placement in both the trombone and producer categories of the DownBeat Critics Poll. He is an accomplished arranger, educator, and composer with compositions for film and television. He has received grants from the Creative Work Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace Foundation, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Wallace has performed, recorded, and studied with many acknowledged masters of the Afro-Latin and jazz idioms, such as Aretha Franklin, Bobby Hutcherson, Earth Wind and Fire, Pete Escovedo, Santana, Julian Priester, Conjunto Libre, Whitney Houston, Tito Puente, Steve Turre, John Lee Hooker, Con Funk Shun, Francisco Aguabella, Manny Oquendo and Libre, Max Roach, the Count Basie Orchestra, and Orestes Vilató. This experience has provided a solid foundation for Wallace's current explorations of the intersections of a wealth of cultural styles and rhythmic concepts. Born and raised in San Francisco, Calif., Wallace was exposed to blues, country and western, R&B, jazz, and Afro-Caribbean music at an early age. The fertile musical environment of the San Francisco Bay Area shaped his career in a unique way. His studies of Afro-Latin music and jazz have included several trips to Cuba, New York City, and Puerto Rico. Widely respected as a teacher and historian, Wallace has taught at San Jose State University, Stanford University, and the Jazzschool in Berkeley. He has conducted lectures, workshops and clinics in the Americas and Europe since 1983. In addition, he is a member of the advisory committees of the San Jose Jazz Society and the Stanford Jazz Workshop. As the head of the critically acclaimed Patois Records, Wallace has created a unique record label with a passionate mission of developing and chronicling the multi-lingual styles of the San Francisco Bay Area music scene. Under his direction the label has released 13 recordings to critical acclaim, including recordings by Wallace, Marc and Paul van Wageningen, and vocalists Kat Parra, Alexa Weber-Morales, and Kristina. Recently, the label released Wallace's Latin Jazz-Jazz Latin, an album that displays all of the thrilling interplay, melodic invention, and blazing improvisational flights that distinguish his music. Salsa De La Bahía, a compilation showcasing Bay Area salsa and Latin jazz, produced by Wallace and Rita Hargrave, will be released Aug. 6. He is an endorser of Conn-Selmer trombones.