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