Kelsey Klotz

Dr. Kelsey Klotz is a lecturer in UNC Charlotte’s Department of Art & Art History and primarily teaches LBST 1103, Arts in Society: Music. Previously, she served as a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University with the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Dr. Klotz graduated with a Ph.D. in Musicology and a graduate certificate in American Culture Studies from Washington University in St. Louis in 2016, where she also earned a Teaching Citation. Dr. Klotz received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music, with a piano concentration, from Truman State University.

In 2016, Dr. Klotz was the recipient of Washington University’s Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence. As an educator, Dr. Klotz teaches critical listening as a method for musical analysis and encountering perspectives different from one’s own. Past courses she has taught include “Hearing Race in 1950s American Musical Culture,” “History of Jazz,” “World Musics,” and “From the Sorrow Songs to Black Lives Matter: Music and Black Political Protest.”

Dr. Klotz is currently working on a book manuscript titled Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness, under contract with Oxford University Press. The project examines white cool jazz pianist Dave Brubeck’s career, music, and reception in the 1950s and 1960s. By analyzing fan letters, unreleased outtakes, private recordings, business documents, reviews, articles, and interviews, Dr. Klotz uncovers the modes of whiteness inherent in critics’, audiences’, and Brubeck’s mid-century constructions of whiteness. Her previous articles have been published in Dædalus: The Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Studies, the Journal of Jazz Studies, and Jazz Perspectives.

Dr. Klotz has presented her research at meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the American Studies Association, the American Studies Association, the Feminist Theory in Music conference, and various regional meetings. In 2016, she received the Charles Seeger Prize for the best student paper at the 2015 national meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her work has been supported by the Brubeck Travel Grant, the Berger-Carter Jazz Research Grant, and the Dissertation Fellowship from Washington University’s Center for the Humanities.