“Ghost Stories of the Archive: Material Legacies and Writing Music History,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 148, no. 3 (October 2024): 203-222.

“The infrastructure of American song contains many specters faded from public consciousness yet still present as moisture in walls. The screams of Aunt Hester, dancing of Jim Crow, silence of Venus . . . the unattainable and highly illuminating animated properties belonging once to the voices of enslaved African Americans. All these and more haunt American music, their dampened legacies intertwined with the weighted domina­tion of capitalism, colonialism, and slavery. At the same time, these spec­ters emphasize Black musical autonomy and how music shapes longstand­ing cultural identities, real or imagined. Analyzing sources as a form of historicized social practice shifts the very foundation on which African American music scholarship rests. The Rodney ghosts are disparate and fleeting, shifting our gaze across the diverse materials in which they reside. Their stories are each unique. These ghosts demand to be heard in their eerie silences, their vague tonal apparitions. Listening to them acknowl­edges the neglected marks of history.”