: About Me

I am a lecturer in music at The Ohio State University. I have also taught music courses at Otterbein University and Ashland University. Topics of my courses have included world music cultures, Western art music, the history of rock and roll, and African American music.

My research focuses on Chinese Buddhist music. My book, entitled The Instrumental Music of Wutaishan’s Buddhist Monasteries: Social and Ritual Contexts, will be published by Ashgate in March of 2012. The book incorporates data I gathered in interviews with monks, pilgrims, and tourists during eleven months of field research in 2006 and 2007 as well as the work of Western and Chinese musicologists, historians and Buddhist scholars. I focus on the flexibility of traditional religious music in China, examining how Wutaishan’s monastic instrumental music has adapted to rapidly changing economic, political and social circumstances in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how it continues to evolve to fulfill new political and economic functions in modern China. I have presented papers on topics related to Chinese Buddhist music at conferences in the US, Europe and China. My article examining the political and economic functions of music in Ghost Festival rituals will appear
in volume 18-19 of the CHIME journal, and another article on the use of secular songs in Buddhist ritual has been approved by editors Mercedes Dujunco and Hwee-San Tan for their upcoming anthology of articles about music and ritual in China. In the near future, I shall broaden my research on religious music into other areas of China, exploring the modern evolution of Buddhist and Daoist instrumental music in and around Beijing, Xi’an, and holy mountains such as Jiuhuashan and Emeishan. I
would also like to look into how Buddhist music is marketed in the world music business.

My passion is ...

Learning about music from people who make it

I know too much about ...

Football (all my husband's fault)

My parents always told me ...

Be honest, be nice and be whatever you want to be

My childhood ambition ...

An "animal doctor"

My favorite memory ...

Roasting marshmallows and wieners to a delicious blackened state while camping with my parents and sister

Why I write ...

I've got nothing better to do!

What I am reading/watching/listening to ...

Job postings. And The Complete Hitchhikers Guide-again.

My first job ...

Picking cocklebur flowers with my sister

My best moment ...

My midnight epiphany that I could combine my desire to return to the mountains of north China and my need for a dissertation topic

My inspiration ...

My husband and family, who always assume I'll do well and convince me of the same

Local Guides > Seattle The significance of the Great Seattle Fire

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On the afternoon of June 6, 1889, a pot of glue destroyed Seattle the rough-and-tumble logging town, making way for Seattle the metropolis. That fateful day, John E. Back was heating glue on the stove in Victor Clairmont's cabinet shop in the basement of the Pontius building at 922 Front Street. The unattended glue pot burst into flames. Attempts to put the fire out with water only spattered the glue around the workshop, and soon the whole building was engulfed. John Back described the events of the day in an interview printed in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "I cut some balls of glue an...

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