Cincinnati Sounds
Exploring a Musical City’s Spaces, Places, and Sounds
The Singing Mural, designed by nationally renowned artist and Cincinnati resident C. F. Payne, this cast of characters represents the community coming together in celebration of the arts. Learn more about the mural.

Cincinnati was officially founded in 1788 and since 1819 has become commonly referred to as “The Queen City.” A river city uniquely situated between the southern and northern United States alongside the Licking and Ohio Rivers, the city itself is a geographic landmark of the Great Migration, Hillbilly Highway, and Western Expansion. For over 230 years, it has buoyed a river of diverse people flowing through it bringing their cultures, customs, musics, and values to create significant landmarks and rich soundscapes. Some have been painstakingly conserved, preserved, and curated, others have been simultaneously profoundly fractured or erased, while others are being artfully and creatively re-imagined.

Many researchers and teachers in post-secondary education and humanities leaders in public arts organizations seek ways to develop diverse and equitable frameworks, just instructional systems, inclusive public spaces, and increased representation. Cincinnati landmarks provide a snapshot of spaces, places, and sounds representing historical migration, changing values, transforming and transformative locations, and modern reinterpretations through sounding and silencing. Across the workshop week, Cincinnati Sounds explores these themes in sites of education, sacred communities, urban development, performing spaces, and justice and freedom centers. The spaces and sounds evince not only a dividing along but also a blurring of historical, racial, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical boundaries.

The project faculty and visiting speakers help to bring such landmarks and sounds together with interdisciplinary scholarship, and applications for humanities scholars to use in their research and teaching. Participants will be supported in storytelling, mapping of sounds, and developing syllabi, units of study, and Storymaps in their work during the week-long workshop and in the follow up post-workshop Zoom meetings. They will be invited to share resources from their own fields as well as utilize those provided by the project team. These shared files will remain available for continued use after the workshop. Team members and participants will continue to grow them after the workshop, which will remain available for continued use.

Dr. Kristy Swift, Project Director and UC CCM Assistant Professor of Music Studies, leads CCM’s Bachelor of Arts in Music program. Her research specializes in historiography, pedagogy, film music, digital humanities, and sound, music, and trauma. Two monographs––Thinking About Music History: Textbooks and the Canon (Clemson University Press) and Music History Resources (Routledge)––and a co-edited collection with Dr. Kimber Andrews, Trauma-Informed Pedagogy and the Post-Secondary Music Class (Routledge) are forthcoming. (https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/swiftak)

Dr. Stefan Fiol, Project Co-Director, UC CCM Professor of Ethnomusicology and Affiliated Faculty in Asian Studies, specializes in dance, music, cultural practices, media, and the histories of commercial and folkloric cultural representation of the Uttarakhand Himalayas and North India. His monograph Recasting Folk in the Himalayas: Indian Music, Media, and Social Mobility (Illinois University Press, 2017) was awarded the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Jim Fisher Book Award (honorable mention). He is currently working with a team of neurologists, therapists, and students researching music and mindfulness in stimulating memory, cognitive function, and experiences of awe and flow. (https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/fiolsn)

Dr. Kori Hill, Project Co-Director, is a musicologist specializing in American Music, Black composers, and nineteenth and twentieth-century music. She annotates music for the Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and Chamber Music Society at Lincoln and is head writer for the Classics for Kids Blog at Cincinnati Public Radio. She is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). (https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/hill4a6)

Dr. Scott Linford, Project Consultant and Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of California, Davis, is a scholar, filmmaker, and musician. He conducts research in West Africa, Central America, and the United States on participation and musical experience, identity and belonging, agriculture and the environment, musical repatriation, and colonial and post-colonial politics. His research has appeared in Ethnomusicology Review, the Yearbook for Traditional Music, and Ethnomusicology Forum. As a banjoist, fiddler, and guitarist, he regularly performs in local old time and bluegrass communities. (https://arts.ucdavis.edu/linford)

Dr. Jenny Doctor, UC CCM Professor of Musicology, is also Head of the Albino Gorno Memorial Library / CCM Library. She specializes in the dissemination of music on BBC Radio, sound recording history, and radio in the US, and has researched and written on twentieth-century British music and musicians. Her books include The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–36 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), The Proms: A Social History, co-edited with David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon (Thames and Hudson, 2007), Silence, Music, Silent Music co-edited with Nicky Losseff (Ashgate, 2007), Watching Jazz: Encounter with Jazz on Screen co-edited with Björn Heile and Peter Eldson (Oxford University Press, 2013), and Music, Life, and Changing Times: Selected Correspondence Between British Composers Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams, 1927–77, co-edited with Sophie Fuller (Routledge, 2019). (https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/doctorjr)

Amy Koshoffer, UC Associate Senior Librarian, supports data management and sharing, open science, data literacy, and research reproducibility initiatives as part of the UC Libraries Research and Data Services unit. She is involved in developing research data services, educational opportunities for data management, data sharing and preservation, data analysis such as GIS and spreadsheet best practices, researcher impact, and collaborative research workflows. Her areas of specialization include support of GIS software-ArcGIS and QGIS.

Dr. Jonathan Kregor, UC CCM Professor of Musicology, specializes in nineteenth-century music. His research interests include aesthetics, Franz Liszt, musical reproduction, music and memory, virtuosity and gender, and art song. His books include Liszt as Transcriber (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which won the Alan Walker Book Award from the American Liszt Society, and Program Music (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He has edited volumes of C.P.E. Bach's keyboard music (Packard Humanities Institute) and Clara Schumann's unpublished arrangements for solo piano (A-R Editions), and has co-edited Liszt et le France. Since 2012 he has been editor of the Journal of the American Liszt Society. (https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/kregorjn)

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Dr. Tammy Kernodle, University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Music at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, specializes in African American concert and popular music and gender studies and music. Her research examines intersections of politics, gender, and racial identity, performance practice, and genre. Dr. Kernodle is author of Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams (Illinois, 2020), and her peer-reviewed articles appear in numerous prominent journals. She contributed to The African American Lectionary Project, the Smithsonian Anthology of Hip Hop and Rap and the Carnegie Hall Digital Timeline of African American Music. She has been featured on CBS News and has worked closely on educational programs with the Kennedy Center’s Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival, Jazz@Lincoln Center, National Public Radio, Canadian Public Radio, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and the BBC. (https://miamioh.edu/profiles/cca/tammy-l-kernodle.html)

Dr. Stephen Meyer, UC CCM Professor of Musicology, specializes in early nineteenth-century music, film music, music history pedagogy, music and medievalism, and the history of recorded sound. He authored Epic Sounds: Music in Postwar Hollywood Biblical Films (Indiana University Press, 2015) and co-edited and contributed to the Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism (Oxford University Press, 2020). He has also served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Music History Pedagogy. (https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/meyer2sc)

Evans Mirageas, the Harry T. Wilks Artistic Director of Cincinnati Opera, is an award-winning record producer, lecturer, interviewer, presenter, and awards panelist. His varied career has included radio production with the nationally renowned WFMT radio station in Chicago, Artistic Administrator to Seiji Ozawa at the Boston Symphony, Senior Vice President of Artists and Repertoire for the Decca Record Company and, from 2012 to 2018, Vice President for Artistic Planning for The Atlanta Symphony. Since 1999, Mirageas has served as an independent artistic advisor to conductors, instrumentalists, singers, symphony orchestras, opera companies, and other performing arts organizations throughout the United States and Europe. (https://www.cincinnatiopera.org/evans-mirageas)

Toilynn O’Neal is a Cincinnati-based artist and arts curator, Executive Director of Queen City Foundation, which aims to provide educational opportunities to minority students, and Founding Director of the Robert O’Neal Multicultural Arts Center (ROMAC), which strives to celebrate, advance, and preserve African American culture and achievement through arts, history, and education while uplifting the rich diversity of artists and cultures of Greater Cincinnati. O’Neal has worked as Education Coordinator for Community Engagement at the Cincinnati Art Museum and at the New American Art Gallery II in downtown Cincinnati. She continued her focus on diversity and inclusion in arts education as a Diversity Trainer and Educational Consultant, helping clients to identify and eliminate barriers to improve recruitment and retention of minorities in grade schools, high schools, and colleges. O’Neal also helps to develop and implement a multicultural platform for the Cincinnati Visitor Bureau. (https://theromac.org/the-ceo-and-founder)

Michael Rathke, owner of M.P. Rathke Inc., is a designer, builder, and conservator of mechanical-action pipe organs. His instruments and restorations are integral to architectural spaces of churches, university concert halls and practice rooms, museums, and private residences throughout the United States. Rathke apprenticed with C. B. Fisk in Gloucester, MA, before working for two years with Mander Organs of London, during which he assisted in the comprehensive refurbishment of the 1871 Willis organ in London's Royal Albert Hall. (https://www.rathkepipeorgans.com/)

Jeff Seuss is a history columnist and librarian at the Cincinnati Enquirer. He also writes fiction and has had stories published by Corpse Flower Press, Pocket Books, Post Mortem Press, and DC Comics. His books include Lost Cincinnati (2015), Hidden History of Cincinnati (2016), Cincinnati Then and Now (2018), AAC 150, Cincinnati: An Illustrated Timeline (2020), and the co-author with Rick Pender of The Cincinnati Bengals: An Illustrated Timeline (2022). (https://www.jeffsuess.com/bio)

Christopher Smith is a Reference Librarian in the Genealogy and Local History Department at the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library, a collection specialist focusing on the Heritage Collection held at the Library. They also serve as program coordinator for the department. Smith has been with the Public Library for over twenty-five years, and also gives talks at conventions, historical societies, and to other community groups.

Thea Thepkema is an author, lecturer, historian, and artist specializing in historic preservation. She is a board member of the Friends of Music Hall, and “knows more about Cincinnati Music Hall—its architecture, its history, its past performers, its recent renovation, and its status as a National Historic Landmark—than anyone on the planet” (Cincinnati Magazine, June 2021). She writes about it, lectures about it, gives tours of both its interior and exterior, and was deeply involved with Music Hall’s recent renovation (2017–18). Thepkema is well known in the city and beyond for her deep knowledge of historic landmarks and the people who inhabited them. (https://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/article/thea-tjepkema-is-music-halls-guardian-angel/)

Dr. Michael Unger, UC CCM Associate Professor of Organ and Harpsichord, is an multi-award-winning soloist and chamber musician internationally renowned in North America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea. He is organist at Cincinnati’s historic Isaac M. Wise Temple (formerly Plum Street Temple), with its Rockwern Organ (built in 1866 by Koehnken & Co, restored in 2005 by the Noack Organ Company), and is well-known for giving recitals and lecture on many notable organs in the Cincinnati area. (https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/ungerml)

Darlene Miller, UC CCM Executive Administrative Assistant in the Composition, Musicology, and Music Theory Division. (https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/milled)

If you have any questions, please contact: Dr Kristy Swift at swiftak@ucmail.uc.edu.

• The main airport serving the Cincinnati area is Cincinnati & Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG).
• In addition to Lyft and Uber, local ground transportation includes various kinds of shuttles and public transportation.

• Interstates I-75, I-71, and I-275 lead into and around Cincinnati and the Tri-State area (where Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana meet).

• Local travel around Cincinnati: view the Cincinnati Visitor Guide

• Participants are responsible for making their own lodging arrangements. Here are suggestions near the campus, but there are many hotel options in and around Cincinnati.
  • Fairfield Inn and Suites Cincinnati Uptown/University. This hotel is easy walking distance from the Workshop classroom.
  • Hampton Inn and Suites Cincinnati Uptown/University Area
  • Airbnb Clifton, Cincinnati

• All meals are on your own.
• Affordable food options are plentiful throughout the University area, including a wide variety of restaurants.
• Several of the meals will occur during site visits:
  • Monday night dinner cruise (optional)
  • Tuesday lunch at the Mariemont Inn
  • Wednesday lunch at Fountain Square
  • Thursday lunch at Findlay Market
  • Thursday dinner at the Over the Rhine district
  • Friday lunch near the Ohio River banks

• Map of Main Workshop locations (PDF) 
  • CCM Library (Level 6, Blegen Library), CCM’s Baur Room, Fairfield Inn    
• CCM Village Google Map
• University of Cincinnati Uptown West (Main) Campus Google Map
• Cincinnati Visitor Guide
  • Local attractions, transportation, maps, restaurants, neighborhoods, parks, shopping & entertainment, etc.

• Federal regulations require that all NEH-funded projects be accessible to people with disabilities in alignment with the requirements of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
• This project provides accessible building and classroom spaces on campus and accessible transportation for site visits.
• All applicants who are invited to participate in the program will be invited to communicate any accommodations they may require before the program’s commencement.

To be considered, you must submit a complete application, following the stated application and acceptance deadlines (see “How to Apply”). In general, application extensions will not be granted. Any questions about applying should be directed to the individual project team. Participant eligibility criteria are determined by NEH. Application review and offer decisions are determined by individual project teams in accordance with NEH eligibility requirements.

• In any given year, an individual may attend only one Institute or Landmarks workshop. Participants may not accept an additional offer or withdraw in order to accept a different offer once they have accepted an offer to attend an NEH Institutes or Landmarks program. Endowment programs do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or age.
• Applicants who accept an offer to participate are expected to remain during the entire period of the program, to participate in its work on a full-time basis, and to engage fully as professionals in all project activities.
  • If a participant is obliged through special circumstances to arrive after the beginning or depart before the end of the Institutes or Landmarks program, it shall be the recipient institution's responsibility to see that only a pro rata share of the stipend is received or that the appropriate pro rata share of the stipend is returned if the participant has already received the full stipend.

The NEH requires project directors to collect anonymous participant evaluations at the conclusion of their programs. Unedited participant evaluation responses will be included in the project’s final report to the NEH and any future Institutes or Landmarks applications.

• The Landmarks of American History and Culture programs are a series of one-week workshops held across the nation that enhance how K-12 educators, higher education faculty, and humanities professionals incorporate place-based approaches to humanities teaching and scholarship.
  • Landmarks workshops provide participants with the opportunity to engage in intensive study and discussion of important topics and issues in American history and culture, while providing them with direct experiences in the interpretation of significant historical and cultural sites and the use of archival and other primary evidence.
  • In NEH Landmarks workshops, participants collaborate with core faculty and visiting scholars to study the best available scholarship on a specific landmark or cluster of landmarks. Participants benefit by gaining a sense of the importance of historical and cultural places, by making connections between the workshop content and what they teach, and by developing individual teaching and/or research materials.
• Programs for higher education faculty and humanities professionals target a national audience of full- or part-time faculty who teach undergraduate students and/or whose work in the humanities lies outside undergraduate teaching but who demonstrate that their participation will advance project goals and enhance their own professional work.
• What is the difference between an applicant and a participant?
  • An individual is considered an applicant if they submit a complete application by the due date to this Landmarks professional development program.
  • An individual is a participant if they accept the project director’s offer to attend by the due date, meet NEH eligibility criteria, and fully participate in program activities.  
• NEH Applicant & Participant FAQs

• The format type for this Landmarks program is residential: all participants attend for the duration of the program at the host site, the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, Ohio. 
• This Landmarks program is a week in duration and is held twice, during the weeks of 6–11 and 20–25 July 2025.
  • This program will include required online meetings before and/or after in-person activities.
  • Please see the workshop Day by Day Schedule for specific details.
• How many participants will attend this Landmarks program?
  • This Landmarks for Higher Education programs may accept 20 participants per week-long workshop, meaning 40 total per program.
  • Landmarks for higher education projects are required to reserve the following percentage of spaces for eligible and qualified early career applicants:
    • 20% of the available spaces for early career faculty (three or fewer years as higher education faculty), humanities professionals, and/or non-tenure track faculty and
    • 10% of the available spaces for advanced graduate students (individuals who have reached candidacy in a doctoral program or are in the final year of a terminal degree program).
• Prior to completing an application to a specific workshop, please review the project website and consider carefully what is expected in terms of residence and attendance, reading and writing requirements, and general participation in the work of the project.

Applicants selected to participate at this one-week long NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture residential program will receive a $1,300 stipend sent to their home addresses following the end of the workshop session.

• Stipends provide compensation to participants for their time commitment and help to defray participation costs, such as travel, program activities, lodging, and meals (for residential programs). For residential programs, participants cover their own costs for travel to/from a program, lodging, and meals.
• Stipends are taxable as income.
• PLEASE NOTE: stipends WILL NOT be available until after the last day of the workshop. All checks will be mailed to the participant’s home address within 30 days of the workshop’s conclusion.
• Participants who do not complete the full tenure of the project will receive a reduced stipend.

• A selection committee (consisting of the project director and at least two project faculty) will read and evaluate all properly completed applications.
• While recent participants are eligible to apply, selection committees are charged to give first consideration to applicants who have not previously participated in an NEH-supported seminar, institute, or workshop.
• Preference is given to applicants who would significantly contribute to the diversity and dissemination of the workshop. 
• Special consideration is given to the likelihood that an applicant will benefit professionally and personally from the workshop experience.  It is important, therefore, to address each of the following factors in the application essay:
  • your professional background;
  • your interest in the subject of the workshop;
  • your special perspectives, skills, or experiences that would contribute to the workshop; and
  • how the experience would enhance your teaching, research, and/or school service.
    

A completed application consists of:

• This completed application form
• A CV detailing your educational qualifications and professional experience (Click on complete form button to upload.)
• A brief essay (around 300 words in length) addressing the following questions: Why do you want to participate in this workshop? What do you teach? How will this workshop advance your research and teaching? What special perspectives, skills, or experiences might you contribute to the workshop? (Click on form link to upload.)

In any given year, an individual may apply to up to two NEH summer projects (NEH Landmarks Workshops, NEH Summer Seminars, or NEH Summer Institutes), but may participate in only one.

Once they have accepted an offer to attend any NEH Summer Program (Landmarks or Institutes), participants may not accept an additional offer or withdraw in order to accept a different offer.

NEH does not condone or tolerate discrimination or harassment based on age, color, disability, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity), genetic information, national original, race, or religion. Nor does NEH condone or tolerate retaliation against those who initiate discrimination complaints (either formally or informally), serve as a witnesses, or otherwise participate in the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) process, or oppose discrimination or harassment. For further information, write to the Equal Opportunity Officer, National Endowment for the Humanities, 400 7th Street, SW, Washington, DC 20024. TDD: 202-606-8282 (this is a special telephone device for the Deaf).

• Applicants will be notified of their status on April 2, 2025. All applicants will be notified of their acceptance, waitlist, or non-acceptance status on this date (not before and not after) by email.
• Applicants who have been accepted will have until April 16, 2025, to accept or decline their offer.
• Questions regarding applications and program requirements should be directed to program project directors. For other inquiries regarding Landmarks of American History and Culture, please email landmarks@neh.gov