Current Musicology Students
Paul David Flood
STUDENT PROFILE
Paul David Flood (he/him) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Musicology whose research engages questions surrounding migration, diaspora, and globalization in contemporary European popular and avant-garde musics. His dissertation asks how members of Europe’s migrant and diasporic communities have engaged with the Eurovision Song Contest in ways that complicate notions of European identity and belonging. He has presented his work at annual meetings of national and international academic societies including the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the Society for Musicology in Ireland. He is the 2024 recipient of the David Sanjek Student Paper Prize from IASPM’s US branch, as well as Eastman’s 2024 recipient of the Presser Graduate Music Award. His academic writing appears in Scandinavian Studies and Global Musical Modernisms. As a public musicologist, Paul has been interviewed by major national news outlets including NPR and The Globe and Mail, and he has written for VAN Magazine and I Care If You Listen. In the classroom, Paul invites his students to explore and critique the ways in which music histories and institutions are shaped by power, and to consider what it would take and mean to live in a more just musical future. He was awarded the University of Rochester’s Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student in 2024.
Paul currently serves on the IASPM-US Executive Committee, and is President of the Eastman Graduate Musicology Association during the 2024-25 academic year. In Spring 2024, he served as a Visiting Researcher at Malmö University in Malmö, Sweden. He earned his MFA in Musicology from the University of California, Irvine, and his BA in Music from Westminster Choir College. Outside of his scholarship, Paul can be found singing with professional chamber choirs throughout the Western New York region; enjoying Rochester’s vibrant queer nightlife scene; playing JRPGs; and petting his cat, Stewie.