Allison Brooks-Conrad

Biography

Allison Brooks-Conrad is a scholar of music and gender in the former Soviet Union. She received her PhD in historical musicology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2025. Dr. Brooks-Conrad’s research examines the intersection of gender, labor, and socialist policy in different scenes of musical production in the Soviet Union. She investigates how women employed music and sound in their attempts to navigate the relationship between their local, peripheral culture and Russian-Soviet culture imposed from the center, studying these questions in Baltic, Caucasian, and Central Asian contexts. She argues that through women’s lives and their everyday musical practices, we can better grasp how individuals negotiated identity at ethnic and national levels, as well as at a Soviet level. Finally, she argues that centering gender reveals the patriarchal and Russifying systems that constructed and constricted, yet did not fully dictate women’s musical lives.

Dr. Brooks-Conrad’s research examines themes relating to motherhood, aging, beauty standards, and feminism in a musicological context. In her research, she combines methods from historical musicology, sound studies, ethnomusicology, and media history. Also an enthusiastic instructor, Dr. Brooks-Conrad teaches courses on popular music, music and gender, Soviet music, sound studies, musicological research methods, and other topics. Her research has been supported by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Stephen F. Cohen-Robert C. Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship and the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania doctoral fellowship. She regularly presents her work at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society (AMS) and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) annual convention.

In addition to her PhD, Dr. Brooks-Conrad holds a Bachelor of Music in cello performance and a Bachelor of Arts in history from Lawrence University and Conservatory.