Natalie Zelensky

Education

• Ph.D., Northwestern

Personal Information

Natalie Zelensky graduated with honors from Northwestern University with a Ph.D. in music studies. Natalie’s research focuses on Russian music, diasporas, nostalgia, American popular music and culture, and Cold War politics.

She has published articles and presented conference papers on Russian popular and sacred music in New York City, Russian-American summer camps, underground sacred music in the Soviet Union, Franco-American music culture in Maine, and racial representation, gender, and marketing in the Classic Blues. Her work has been published in Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of the Society for American Music, The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, and Russia Abroad: Music and Orthodoxy.

Her book, Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Emigres, and the American Imagination, examines the intersection of politics and performance in the aesthetic, commercial, and diasporic space of Russian music as it emerged in New York’s nightclubs, concert stages, radio waves, and sheet music (Indiana University Press, 2019 and in Russian translation by Academic Studies Press, 2023). She co-authored the instructor’s manual for Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development (Prentice-Hall, 2008, 2012) and helped translate and write the footnotes for W.W. Norton’s 2011 edition of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

In 2013, she won a fellowship with the National Endowment for the Humanities to participate in the Columbia University Harriman Institute’s “America’s Russian-Speaking Immigrants and Refugees: 20th-Century Migration and Memory.”