Dr. Allie Martin Interview
Dr. Allie Martin is Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. Over the years, her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Society for American Music, and the American Musicological Society. She says some of her favorite work, however, is “teaching, especially hip-hop. Students are so excited and passionate to talk about the music that they’ve grown up with and it makes for a very rich classroom environment.”
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
My path started largely in undergrad, where I was majoring in music (violin) and audio production. I was quite sure that I was going to be a violin teacher and session musician, but then I took an ethnomusicology class during junior year, and slowly but surely transitioned onto the path of getting a PhD in ethnomusicology. I went to Indiana University to study with people like Mellonee Burnim, Fernando Orejuela, and Alisha Jones, and shifted my study from how go-go music (DC’s local subgenre of funk) was handling gentrification to how gentrification sounds more broadly. I fell into digital humanities and sound studies along the way and now here I am at Dartmouth, teaching Black popular music courses inspired by my graduate school training and researching sound and Black life.
Did you have any mentors along the way? What did they teach you?