Joan Titus

Education

Biography

Professor Titus is on research leave at the National Humanities Center for the 2023-2024 academic year.  

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 is drafting 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. 

Subjects Taught

Graduate Courses

• Music 706, Doctoral Research Seminar, “On the Hero(ine): The Trope of Heroism in Film Music of the World”
• Music 706, Doctoral Research Seminar, “Music and Visual Cultures in the Indigenous U.S.”
• Music 706, Doctoral Research Seminar, “Music and Media”
• Music 706, Doctoral Research Seminar, “Music and Cinema”
• Music 686/786, Twentieth Century Music (Topic: Social Justice and Audiovisual Media)
• Music 686, Twentieth Century Music (Topic: Image and Sound)
• Music 606, Research Seminar, “Music and Image”
• Music 606, Research Seminar, “Music and Politics in the Russian/Soviet Imaginary”
• Music 606, Research Seminar, “Musical Narrative in African and American Film”
• Music 606B, Research Seminar, “Music and Narrative”
• Music 606C, Research Seminar, “Soviet/Russian Film Music”
• Music 606, Research Seminar, “Shostakovich and Film”
• Music 602, Seminar in Music Research and Writing
• Music 526, Overview of Western Music History

Undergraduate Courses

• Music 492, Senior Capstone for B.A. in Music
• Music 486, Twentieth Century Music (Topic: Social Justice and Audiovisual Media)
• Music 486, Twentieth Century Music (Topic: Image and Sound)
• Music 400x/600x, Gender & Audiovisual Cultures in the US & Russia
• Music 333, History of Western Music III for music majors
• Music 332, History of Western Music II for music majors
• Music 242, Music for Film
• International and Global Studies 213, Introduction to Russian Studies
• Music 120, Freshman Listening Seminar

Scholarly Creative/Research Activity

Select Publications

Books

Dmitry Shostakovich and Music for Thaw Cinema, in progress. 

Dmitry Shostakovich and Music for Stalinist Cinema (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, 2024). 

The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Book Chapters

“Schauspiel und Filmmusik: Maxim-Trilogie bis in die 1950er Jahre.” In Schostakowitsch-Handbuch, edited by Dorothea Redepenning and Stefan Weiss. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler (Barenreiter), in progress, 16 pages.

“Schauspiel und Filmmusik: Die späten Werke (ab Hamlet, 1964).” In Schostakowitsch-Handbuch, edited by Dorothea Redepenning and Stefan Weiss. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler (Barenreiter), in progress, 6 pages.

“Experimentalism and the ‘Mainstream’ in the Early Film Scores of Gavriil Popov and Vladimir Shcherbachyov.” In The Routledge Companion to Global Film Music in the Early Sound Era, edited by Jeremy Barham. New York: Routledge Press, 2024.

“Shostakovich, Arnshtam, and the Women’s Soviet War Film.” In  Music, Authorship, and Narration, and Art Cinema in Europe, edited by Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Boczkowska. New York: Routledge Press, 2023. 

“A Tale of Two Cinemas: Zashchitniki (Guardians , 2017) and Music for the New Russian Superhero Film.” In Music in Action Film: Sounds Like Action!, edited by James Buhler and Mark Durrand, 181–200. New York: Routledge Press, 2020.

“Silents, Sound, and Modernism in Dmitry Shostakovich’s Score to the New Babylon (1928–1929).” In Sound, Speech, and Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, edited by Masha Salazkina and Lilya Kaganovsky, 38–59. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.

“Dmitry Shostakovich as Film Music Theorist.” In Music and Politics in Twentieth-Century Europe: Essays in Memory of Neil Edmunds, edited by Pauline Fairclough, 249–260. London: Ashgate Press, 2012.

“Waila as Transnational Practice.” In Transnational Encounters. Music and Performance at the U.S.-Mexico Border, edited by Alejandro Madrid, 149–167. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. (AMS Ruth A. Solie Award Winner, 2012.)

Essay and Translation of “About the Music to the New Babylon” by Dmitry Shostakovich. In Film Music: Source Readings, 1910–1951, edited by James Wierzbicki, Colin Roust, and Nathan Platte, 61–64. London: Routledge Press, 2011.

“Socialist Realism, Modernism, and Dmitry Shostakovich’s Odna (Alone , 1931).” In Shostakovich Studies 2, edited by Pauline Fairclough, 100–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Encyclopedia Entries, Bibliographic Articles, Conference Reports

“Russian Film Music.” Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies. Ed. Krin Gabbard. New York: Oxford University Press, in progress.

“Bernard Herrmann.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Cinema and Media Studies. Ed. Krin Gabbard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“Reflections on Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle 2019.” Music, Soundand Moving Image 13, no.1 (Spring 2019): 59–82. Co-authored with James Buhler, Eric  Dienstfry, Brooke McCorkle, and Katherine Quanz.

“Human Rights, Music and.” In The Sage Encyclopedia of Ethnomusicology, edited by Janet L. Sturman, 1090–1094. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2019).

Book Reviews

Review of Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination by Natalie Zelensky. American Music, 40, No.2, (2022), 272–275. 

Review of This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia by Joan Neuberger. American Historical Review, 126, issue 2 (June 2021): 876–877.

Review of Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics by Marina Frolova-Walker. Russian Review, 76, No. 4 (October 2017): 756.

Review of The Struggle for Control of Soviet Music from 1932 to 1948: Socialist Realism vs. Western Formalism, by Meri Herrala. Russian Review, 72, No.2 (April 2013): 317–318.

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Photo credit: © Joel Elliot, NHC