Author Biography
Braxton D. Shelley a musicologist who specializes in African American popular music, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music and the Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. His research and critical interests, while currently focused on African American gospel performance, extend into media studies, sound studies, phenomenology, homiletics, and theology.
After earning a BA in Music and History from Duke University, Shelley received his PhD in the History and Theory of Music at the University of Chicago. While at the University of Chicago, he also earned a Master of Divinity from the university’s Divinity School. His 2017 dissertation, “Sermons in Song: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination,” developed an analytical paradigm for gospel music that braids together resources from cognitive theory, ritual theory, and homiletics with studies of repetition, form, rhythm and meter. Recipient of the 2016 Paul A. Pisk Prize from the American Musicological Society, the 2016 Graduate Student Prize from the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, and the 2018 Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award from the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities, he has presented his research at Amherst College, Brandeis University, Columbia University, Duke University, Northeastern University, Northwestern University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Tufts University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Yale University, as well as at the annual meetings of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, Music Theory Midwest, the Society for Music Theory, and the American Musicological Society. His publications include the following essays: “Sounding Belief: ‘Tuning Up’ and The Gospel Imagination,” in Exploring Christian Song, “‘This Must Be The Single’: Valuing The Live Recording in Contemporary Gospel Performance,” in Living the Life I Sing, “Gospel Goes To Church (Again): Richard Smallwood’s Hybridity as Liturgical Compromise,” in Readings in African American Church Music and Worship, vol 2, and “Analyzing Gospel,” in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. His current projects include an article on Aretha Franklin’s vocality, an article on music and protest in the North Carolina-based Moral Mondays movement, and a book-length study of African American gospel music.
Braxton D. Shelley a musicologist who specializes in African American popular music, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music and the Stanley A. Marks and William H. Marks Assistant Professor in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. In July 2021, Prof. Shelley will join Yale's faculty as a tenured associate professor of music, of sacred music, and of divinity in the Department of Music, the Institute of Sacred Music, and the Divinity School. His research and critical interests, while currently focused on African American gospel performance, extend into media studies, sound studies, phenomenology, homiletics, and theology.
After earning a BA in Music and History from Duke University, Shelley received his PhD in the History and Theory of Music at the University of Chicago. While at the University of Chicago, he also earned a Master of Divinity from the university’s Divinity School. His first book, Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination (OUP, 2021) develops an analytical paradigm for gospel music that braids together resources from cognitive theory, ritual theory, and homiletics with studies of repetition, form, rhythm and meter. Recipient of the Alfred Einstein Prize and the Paul A. Pisk Prize from the American Musicological Society, the Jaap Kunst Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Adam Krims Award from the Society for Music Theory's Popular Music Interest Group, the 2016 Graduate Student Prize from the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, and the 2018 Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award from the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities, he has presented his research at Amherst College, Brandeis University, Columbia University, Duke University, Northeastern University, Northwestern University, SUNY-Stony Brook, Tufts University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Yale University, as well as at the annual meetings of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, Music Theory Midwest, the Society for Music Theory, and the American Musicological Society. His publications include the following essays: “Sounding Belief: ‘Tuning Up’ and The Gospel Imagination,” in Exploring Christian Song, “‘This Must Be The Single’: Valuing The Live Recording in Contemporary Gospel Performance,” in Living the Life I Sing, “Gospel Goes To Church (Again): Richard Smallwood’s Hybridity as Liturgical Compromise,” in Readings in African American Church Music and Worship, vol 2, and “Analyzing Gospel,” in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. His current projects include an article on Aretha Franklin’s vocality, an article on music and digital culture, and a book-length study of the life and afterlife of Bishop Gilbert E. Patterson.
Prof. Shelley’s scholarship is enriched by work as both an active performer and ordained minister. His itinerant preaching and music ministry takes material form in the 2018 CD, Sermons in Song, a compilation of compositions which have been performed in venues including the Gospel Music Workshop of American and the Hampton University Ministers’ Conference.
