Chase Castle is a cultural historian of music. He is currently a Robert M. Kingdon Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research concerns the social lives of music—how it plays out in ordinary experiences, how it transforms across space and time, how it contains sensational power. Castle specializes in American religious music across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current book project, The Gospel in Black and White: Race and Popular Culture in American Hymns, uncovers African American and white musical influences in the formation of gospel hymns, a popular sacred genre that rose to prominence between 1875 and 1915. Unlike previous scholarship that often separates Black from white histories and treats African American music primarily in terms of spirituals, Castle’s research casts a wider net to consider how racial politics played out in pervasive, popular, sacred practices. He uses material archives and affect theory to show how music operates in cultural history. Castle received a PhD in Music from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2024. He is also an active organist and choral conductor.
Curriculum Vitae
Education
Ph.D. Music
University of Pennsylvania
2024
B.M. Music History & Literature and Organ Performance
Baldwin Wallace University
2019
Writing
“Gothic Watts: Race and Conversion in Early American Hymnbooks,” in The Legacy of Isaac Watts’ Hymnody: Songs Before Unknown, ed. Martin V. Clarke and Daniel Johnson. Congregational Music Studies Series. New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2026.
“Bamboula: Obsession and Race in the Piano Music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk,” in Open Access Musicology: Volume Three, ed. Daniel Barolsky and Trudi Wright. Ann Arbor: Lever Press, forthcoming 2026.
“For the Want of Revival: Charlie Kirk’s Memorial Sparks Another Awakening,” The Commons, aprilonline.org (30 September 2025).
“Ghost Stories of the Archive: Material Legacies and Writing Music History,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 148, no. 3 (October 2024): 203-222.
“Sonic Domination and the Politics of Race in Southern Antebellum Hymnody,” Journal of the Society for American Music 17, no. 4 (November 2023): 383-405.
Reviewed in The Hymn 75, no. 2 (Spring 2024): 31.
“The voice of free grace cries escape to the mountain,” with Chris Fenner, Hymnology Archive, hymnologyarchive.com (15 February 2023).
Teaching
Appreciation of Music
Undergraduate Survey Course
Queer Perspectives on Popular Music
Undergraduate Topics Course
Materials and Methods of Research
Graduate Proseminar
Talks
Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “The Gospel in Black and White: Race and Popular Culture in American Hymns” (29 September 2025)
Ludus Chronalis: Time, Cadence, and Temporality in Keyboard Music and Sacred Spaces, University of Michigan, “Early American Sound and Silence in the Organ Music of Ned Rorem” (6 October 2025)
Religious Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Always Awakened: Gospel Hymns and the Spectacle of American Revivalism, 1875-1900” (24 October 2025)
Media
Contact
