Dr. Jessica Stearns is Assistant Professor of Music in Musicology/Ethnomusicology at East Texas A&M University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in music history, culture, and research. Her primary area of scholarship is experimental and indeterminate music in the United States, with secondary areas in sound studies and media studies. Across her research, Dr. Stearns examines how musical meaning emerges through processes of composition, performance, listening, mediation, and encounter. She applies practitioner-centered approaches to examine how musical knowledge and experience develop through embodied and situated engagement with music, including autoethnography, interviews, archival research, and other forms of fieldwork. Dr. Stearns has presented her research at national and international conferences in North America and Europe. Her scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the New York Public Library, the Music Library Association, the University of North Texas, and East Texas A&M University.

Dr. Stearns remains active as a saxophonist performing in experimental music groups and has presented and performed at the conferences for the North American Saxophone Alliance, International Clarinet Association, International Computer Music Conference, and Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States. She has recorded an album with her free improvisation trio, Sonoren, and has collaborated with School of Music faculty to record an album of Christian Wolff's indeterminate works.

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND

• PhD, Musicology, University of North Texas, 2022
• MM, Saxophone Performance, Stephen F. Austin State University, 2012
• BME, Music Education, Stetson University, 2009

HONORS AND AWARDS

• Paul W. Barrus Distinguished Faculty Award for Teaching

PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

• American Musicological Society
• Society for American Music
• Society for Music Theory
• North American Saxophone Alliance
• Pi Kappa Lambda