Hi folks. I’m Dean. I’m an ethnomusicologist. That means I study music in its social and cultural contexts. I earned a Ph.D. at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in 2017. My work there focused on the ways that jazz musicians in New York are using recording technologies and new media to make, share, and listen to music. You can find it here. You can find links to some of my other scholarly work on my writing page.

For most of my graduate studies and for a little while after I finished, I taught undergraduate music classes at colleges and universities all over the area, from intro to world music at City College, to jazz history at Princeton, to a course I created called “Bass Music” at The New School. Check out the syllabus for that course.

Currently, I am a stay-at-home dad. My research interests have begun to spread into animal musicalities, or what has been called “zoomusicology” by practitioners. This partly owes to my lifelong love of animals and my rather recent advocacy work on behalf of animals abused and killed by factory farming. The blog on this website will mostly feature my explorations of the places where music and animal rights/welfare intersect.