Andrew Dell'Antonio

Co-Chair

Andrew Dell’Antonio (left, with his collaborator Steph Ban on the right) is both a decorated pedagogue and a zany  neurodivergent chaos muppet. Thoroughly trained in normative Euro-canonic musical-theoretical approaches, he has recently realized that his training was difficult and ultimately incompletely absorbed because of its friction with his particular neurodivergent sensorium.  While his early career focused on musical traditions of early modern Europe, more recently he has collaborated with Steph Ban and others to open scholarly spaces for disabled and neurodivergent musicking both inside and outside of academia. The broader goal of his collaborations is to seek practical applications of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to music historiography and higher-education pedagogy, from perspectives informed by critical disability studies. 

Sarah Miller

Co-Chair
​[email protected]

Sarah Miller is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of California, Davis. She holds an M.A. in Musicology and an M.M. in Vocal Performance from Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. Her research interests in eighteenth-century opera buffa, commedia dell’arte, and disability studies culminated in her dissertation “Disability in Flux: Performing Disability in Carlo Goldoni’s Comic Operas,” which investigates the imprint of commedia dell’arte that remains in Carlo Goldoni’s libretti. Primarily focusing on his works that center around comedic representations of difference, Sarah observes how Goldoni’s usage of stock characters both relies on stereotypical portrayals of Disability and challenges conventional understandings of disabled agency and the stock character system itself. Sarah identifies as both neurodivergent and disabled. As the Co-Chair of the AMS Music and Disability Study Group, Sarah works to create welcoming spaces for disabled scholars in music academia. ​

Rena Roussin

Secretary

​Rena Roussin is a doctoral candidate in musicology in the Faculty of Music. She studies classical music’s historic and current relationships to issues of equity and social justice, with a particular emphasis on opera. Her dissertation, “Positioning Classical Music(ology): Histories, Institutions, Narratives,” utilizes numerous case studies (including disability historiography in music biography, the rise of EDI initiatives in post-secondary music education, and Indigenous-led work in opera in Canada) to analyze how classical music and musicology are responding to changing and increasingly intersectional social climates. Rena serves as musicologist-in-residence for the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, on the Canadian Opera Company’s Circle of Artists, and as Secretary of the AMS Music and Disability Studies Study Group. Her current and forthcoming publications appear with Bloomsbury, Cambridge, Oxford, and Wilfrid Laurier Presses.

Tekla Babyak

Interim Secretary

Tekla Babyak holds a PhD in Musicology from Cornell University. Based in Davis, CA, she is an independent scholar and disability activist with multiple sclerosis (MS). Her research interests include European Romanticism, with a focus on musical analysis and philosophical aesthetics. Recent publications have appeared in journals such as 19th-Century Music and Nineteenth-Century Music Review as well as several edited collections. Currently, she is working on an autoethnography exploring how her MS-related neurodivergence intersects with her erotic attraction to composers such as Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. 


Tekla always brings an activist-oriented perspective to her research projects. She advocates for her access needs when giving talks and publishing her work, requesting compliments to accommodate her MS-related anxiety disorder. These requests are a form of activism. Scholars are expected to be (or at least appear) confident when presenting their work publicly. Subverting these ableist expectations, Tekla aims to destigmatize – and honor – anxiety disclosure in professional spaces, and to celebrate disabled ways of navigating academia.