Joan Titus

Joan Titus examines the cultural politics of audiovisual media, with a focus on the intersections of nationalism, ethnicity, and gender in music for cinema. She has conducted research in Russia, the US, and Morocco. Her research engages the themes of Soviet and Russian film music, indigeneity and power, transnationalism and music festivals, and the intersectionality of gender, race, and nationalism in screen media. Dr. Titus’s recent projects include postfeminist framing of nation and gender in US cinema and music; Soviet Russian modernism, postmodernism, and socialist realism in music and cinema cultures; liminality in global audiovisual histories; and a book trilogy on the cultural politics of Dmitry Shostakovich’s film scoring career in the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1971.The first of these books, The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich (Oxford University Press, 2016) provides examinations of narration and the intricacies of cultural politics in Shostakovich’s early film scores. Her second book, Dmitry Shostakovich and Music for Stalinist Cinema (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2024), continues this examination through case studies of his scores from 1936 to 1953, and maps out Shostakovich’s negotiation of the Soviet film industry and his maturity as a film composer by the end of Stalinism. The final book of the trilogy, Dmitry Shostakovich and Music for Thaw Cinema addresses film music making and Shostakovich’s work during the Thaw and Stagnation through 1971. She worked on this book at the National Humanities Center in 2023–2024. In her other publications, she examines cultural politics specific to indigeneity and transnational identities, gender and sound in cinema, and issues surrounding early modernist Russian film scoring. She is currently working on essay projects that addresses questions of gender in Soviet and Russian film scores, and the transnational slippage between Soviet/Russian and US filmmaking and scoring. Dr. Titus has published in various edited volumes, encyclopedias, and journals including American Historical Review, American Music, and Russian Review. She has given invited talks and spoken at conferences in the U.S. and abroad, including the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, Society for American Music, International Musicological Society, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies. Her research has been funded by the National Humanities Center (2023–2024), the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2017–2018), NEH Summer Stipend (2016), the AMS 75 PAYS Publication Subvention, multiple fellowships from the U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS), and numerous institutional awards. Dr. Titus teaches a diverse range of undergraduate and graduate courses on cultural politics in musics across the world, Russian and Soviet music, gender and feminism in music, music and screen media, and surveys of concert and stage music of European/US American traditions. She developed and taught the undergraduate UNCG General Education course “Music for Film,” and teaches advanced graduate seminars on music and screen media, audiovisual media in Russia and the US, indigenous music in the US, and transnational music in Russia, United States, and North Africa. She served as an editor for Musicology Now, the online platform for the American Musicological Society; and directed the Irna Priore Music and Culture Lecture Series at UNCG (2019–2022). She has also served as co-chair of the Sound and Music Studies SIG for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies

There are 10 included publications by Joan Titus :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Essay and Translation of “About the Music to the New Babylon” by Dmitry Shostakovich 2011 205 Dmitry Shostakovich (1906-75) published his first essay on film music during the Cultural Revolution, a time when all the arts in the Soviet Union were experiencing significant change. Film in particular was targeted because of its potential to carry...
Reflections on Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle 2019 2019 108 Sound and music again had excellent representation on the programme at this year’s annual meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) – an immense conference, with roughly 420 panels. SCMS has an official Sound and Music Studies Schola...
Review of The Struggle for Control of Soviet Music from 1932 to 1948: Socialist Realism vs. Western Formalism, by Meri Herrala 2013 762 In her descriptive and lengthy tome, Finnish historian Meri Herrala uses Soviet opera as a lens to examine the nuanced relationships between the Union of Soviet Composers, opera theaters, Muzfond, and other Soviet musical-cultural institutions betwee...
Shostakovich as Film Music Theorist 2013 323 Shostakovich’s call for a solid knowledge of how to write music properly for cinema continued throughout his life. It began with his first article on the film The New Babylon, and continued into his scores for films in the 1950s. He was one of the fi...
Silents, Sound, and Modernism in Dmitry Shostakovich’s Score to the New Babylon (1928–1929 2014 481 Although widely regarded by scholars and general audiences as one of the greatest of the last “silent” films, Novyi Vavilon (New Babylon, dir. Kozintsev and Trauberg, 1929) was initially a surprising failure. Even with its original score by the celeb...
Socialist Realism, Modernism, and Dmitry Shostakovich’s Odna (Alone, 1931) 2010 680 After the somewhat unsuccessful premiere of The New Babylon in 1929, Grigoriy Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg embarked on a new film, Odna (Alone). At this point in time, the arts, including music and film, were experiencing a shift into what would bec...
Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics by Marina Frolova-Walker [book review] 2017 134 In this book, musicologist Marina Frolova-Walker details the process and circumstances around the origin and awarding of the Stalin Prize, with special attention to the category of Music. Using extensive archival sources mixed with anecdotal stories ...
A Tale of Two Cinemas: Zashchitniki (Guardians, 2017) and Music for the New Russian Superhero Film 2020 309 The film Zashchitniki (Guardians, 2017), directed by the Russian-Armenian filmmaker Sarik Andreasyan, is a remarkably obvious and intentional nod to the Hollywood Marvel and DC franchises not only in title and narrative, but also in overall style. An...
This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia by Joan Neuberger [book review] 2021 96 In This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia, Joan Neuberger offers a detailed examination of Sergei Eisenstein’s final film, Ivan the Terrible (parts 1, 2, and 3), and asserts that the film was a laboratory for the di...
Waila as Transnational Practice 2011 958 This chapter studies the development of waila as a local reinvention of traditions from Germany and Mexico among the Tohono O’odham from Arizona, putting in evidence transnational flows that have historically informed the everyday lives and social co...