Kate Alexander

Kate Alexander is an ethnomusicologist specializing in the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in North American social dance communities. She has worked previously to map formations of ethnic whiteness in Cape Breton’s traditional Scottish music and dance culture, while her current research focuses on American LGBTQ country western dance and rodeo networks. In framing issues of gender, whiteness, and place phenomenologically, Dr. Alexander investigates how the diffuse LGBTQ country western community creates meaning, coherence, and sociality for its participants, with implications for larger questions of race, class, and regionalism in contemporary America. Her work has been published in journals such as MUSICultures and the Yearbook for Traditional Music. As an Assistant Professor of Practice in the W.A. Franke Honors College at the University of Arizona, she teaches interdisciplinary courses on sound, music, visual art, and culture.