About Me

I am an editor, musicologist, adjunct professor, and church musician, among other things. My last name is pronounced “mar,” and I use she/her pronouns. You can find me on Twitter at @MaherEK.

I received my Ph.D. in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016, where I completed my dissertation as an AAUW American Fellow. I also have a bachelor’s degree in music composition from Moravian College (now University!), and after taking a long break from composing during graduate school, I returned to writing music for church use. I also taught music appreciation as an adjunct from 2016 to 2023.

I got my start in academic editing as a graduate student, when I served as editorial assistant for the Journal of the American Musicological Society. In 2019, I completed the Introduction to Professional Academic Editing course from Ideas On Fire, and I have since pursued further training through the Editorial Freelancers Association and the American Society for Indexing. For more on my professional training and experience, see my CV.

As an independent scholar, I don’t have the time or resources for engaging in research that I once had, but I’m always holding out hope that I’ll be able to do more in the future! My primary research area is the transnational culture and networks of concert music in the twentieth century, particularly in the United States and France. So far, most of my scholarly work has centered on the composer Darius Milhaud (1892–1974). My 2016 dissertation (available at the open-access Carolina Digital Repository) presented the first full-length study of Milhaud’s time in the United States, and my more recent work on this topic has focused on his complex relationship to the postwar avant-garde.

I have presented my research at regional, national, and international conferences, including meetings of the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society. My publications include an article on Agnes de Mille’s ballet Black Ritual (Musical Quarterly, Fall 2014) and the annotated bibliography on Darius Milhaud for Oxford Bibliographies in Music (2017). For more on my academic work, see my CV.

I am a long-time member of Central Baptist Church in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where I sing in the choir, play in the contemporary band, participate in worship planning, and help to process and manage the church archives. Like many people with PhDs, I have some trouble with the concept of work-life balance, but some things I enjoy include doing crossword puzzles and other word games, participating in National Novel Writing Month, and spending too much time on Twitter.