University College Cork

Dr. Emily Gale is Lecturer in Popular Music Studies at University College Cork. Her book in progress, Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People: An Unheard History of US Popular Music, explores intersections between sentimentalism, gender, class, and race with chapters on: sentimental ballads of the long nineteenth century; the early Chicago radio program The National Barn Dance; Mitch Miller’s 1960s television show Sing Along with Mitch; 1970s soft rock; and more.  

Gale’s article on citizenship and settler colonialism in Calixa Lavallée’s 1883 operetta The Indian Question: Settled at Last is published in The Opera Quarterly (Winter 2016). In 2015, her ongoing work on Mitch Miller was supported by a research fellowship at the New York Public Library. Currently, she hosts a Berlin-based radio show about her research on Threads*/sub_ʇxǝʇ and her feminist music column History Witch appears in Berlin’s Schmutz zine.    

A singer, pianist, and melodica player, Gale has performed with new music ensembles, rock bands, and as a soloist. She has served as vice president of a regional symphony and on the leadership team for a youth arts engagement program. From 2014-2018 she was Lecturer in the Global Arts Studies Program at University of California, Merced where the LGBTQ+ Initiatives office awarded her the Faculty Building Community Award. She also directed a campus and community arts series that brought Alice Bag and the Sissy Bears, Fatty Cakes and the Puff Pastries, Kaumakaiwa Kanaka’ole with Shawn Pimental, and the Vijay Iyer Sextet to Merced.    

Gale earned her Bachelor of Music from the University of Ottawa in 2005 and an M.A. in Music Theory from the University of Western Ontario in 2007. After spending a year in the inaugural class of Western’s M.A. in Popular Music and Culture (2007-08), she entered the Critical and Comparative Studies program at the University of Virginia where she completed her Ph.D. in 2014.

Emily's undergraduate and postgraduate teaching interests are focused in the areas of popular music studies, musicology, and music theory. Her teaching incorporates insights from gender and sexuality studies, sound studies, media studies, critical race studies, and cultural studies. She is especially interested in emotion and affect, feminism, and archival research.

Emily's recent teaching includes: 

• Multidisciplinary Debates in Musicology and Ethnomusicology (MA)
• Music and Popular Culture (MA)
• Western Music, Culture, and Media (UG)
• Music in Culture and Society (UG)
• Senior Research Forum (UG)
• Harmony (UG)
  

Emily's previous undergraduate teaching experience includes: