Publications
This page offers a selection of publications and talks from the last few years. For a comprehensive list find my CV in the menu.
In “Listening with Whales: From Silence to Song,” I show how the 1970 album Songs of the Humpback Whale catalyzed a wave of artistic, scientific, popular, and environmental engagement that contributed to a global movement against commercial whaling. By framing whale songs as a political force, this chapter ultimately argues that listening to and with whales, and recognizing more-than-human cultural agency, represent an important path towards decoloniality and ecocentrism. The chapter is published in an edited volume titled Listening to the Swan Song edited by Piotr Kociumbas and Joanna Godlewicz-Adamiec.
More recently, Marianna Ritchey and I co-wrote “Erosic Attuning: Becoming Better Animals by Grieving with Whales,” asking what does it mean if a whale grieves, and we grieve with them? We argue that attuning with the more-than-human creates the possibility of becoming a better animal, one grounded in a more diverse experience of kinship. We theorize erosic attuning as a relational and insurgent mode of co-sensing that operates not through conceptual thinking, but through embodied presence. The article is forthcoming in Trace and will be published in Fall 2026. (If you’d like to be notified when it comes out, send me an email and I’ll add you to the list!)
Invited Talks
I love talking about how music and sound mediates whale and human connections and have recently been invited to speak at several universities and land trusts, including Wesleyan University, the University of Bologna, the Biome Trust in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Bradford Land Trust in Connecticut.
In 2025, I was honored to share a colloquium with Rachel Mundy, titled “Whales, Moths, and the Scales of Life and Death,” at Wesleyan University and to speak at conference and institutions about about the political power and environmental consequences of singing and listening with whales.
I presented “Listening with Comrade Orca: Becoming Better Animals Through Multispecies Solidarity,” based on the work with Marianna Ritchey on our forthcoming article “Erosic Attuning,” at the 11th Biennial EASLCE Conference “Join the Orca Uprising!” about multispecies resistance at the Utrecht University in April 2026, as well as “Listening to Whales: Exploring Ecocentric Activism through Sonic Entanglements,” at the 48th World Conference of the International Council for Traditional Music and Dance, in Wellington, Aotearoa, New Zealand, in January 2025.
In February 2026, I was honored to speak to an incredibly attentive and dedicated community in Brandford. I presented my talk, “Singing and Listening with Whales: Exploring Human and More-Than-Human Musicalities,” at the Blackstone Library, followed by an engaging conversation on how what we can do to face the climate crises and to protect our oceans.
While teaching at Mount Holyoke College, I was invited to speak about my research on human whale songs and queerness, which I titled, “Queering Whale Songs: Making Waves Through the Anthropocene.”
In 2024, I presented “A Sonically Reimagined Silence: How the Discovery of Whale Songs Inspired an Environmental Commitment to the Ocean,” for the ELEMENTS project at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.
This led to becoming a visiting scholar and to the publication of “Listening with Whales: From Silence to Song,” as well as a short blog post titled ““How Kētos became Whale: Oceanic Cosmologies in Sky and Sea.”
Forthcoming and Recent Talks
“Training ‘Pure Musical Vessels’: Fatphobia and Body Policing of Classical Instrumentalists” in our organized panel “Fatphobia in Western Classical Music: Historic and Contemporary Perspectives” presented online alongside Anna Valcour and Emma Jensen, American Musicological Society (AMS), November, 2026.
“Listening into Transcendence: Gender, Genius, and the Cultural Politics of Whale Song” in our panel “Listening Beyond Ourselves: Meaning-Making in the More-than-Human Sonic Worlds,” sponsored by SIG at the Society of Ethnomusicology, Bloomington, November 2026.
“The Whale in the Room: Music, Language, and Meaning,” shared panel with David Rothenberg, Finley Woodson-Gammon, and Alex South, “Environmental Pasts and Futures: Beyond Dualism—Thinking Creatively Across Worlds,” at the Rachel Carson Center For Environment and Humanities, July 2026.
“Sounding Change: Whales, Environmental Activism, and Politics of Listening,” 4th International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding, Ottawa, Canada, June 2026.
“What does it mean to listen musically to whales? Notation, Embodiment, and Collective Improvisation,” with Finn Woodson-Gammon, at the University of Nevada, Reno & at the New Jersey Technology Institute, November 2025.
“Whalesong, Warsong: Cetaceans, Conflict, and Cooperation,” for the “Peace Notes series” hosted by the Environmental Building Peace Association, presented online, September 2025.
“The Pure Musical Vessel and the Aesthetic Regime of Classical Music: Fatphobia, Hierarchy, and Embodied Discipline,” Grainder Symposium, “Music and Fashion,” at the University of Melbourne in December 2025.
“Listening with Whales: Becoming Better Animals Through Human-Whale Connections,” at the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD) Study Group, online workshop, November 2025.
“Grieving with and for Whales” co-presented with Alex South at the ICTMD Multispecies Sound and Movement Study Group business meeting, September 2025.
“Listening to Grief, Singing into Birth: Mother Whales, Women Mothers, and Sonic Practices of Healing,” NECSEM, May 2025.
“The Ideal Traumatized Body: Shaping Beauty Standards for Young Women and Genderqueer Performers” within the co-led panel “Surviving Dreams, Living Trauma: The Invisible Barriers That Stand Between Performers and Their Success,” at the Society of Ethnomusicology Annual Conference, October 2023. Panel sponsored by the SEM Section Status of Women (SWW).
