K.A. (Kristin McGee) McGee, Dr

ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND

Kristin McGee initiatied the popular music specialization within the Arts, Culture and Media degree program in 2004. The program offers a multifacated curriculum for the study of popular music in contemporary contexts while also exploring historical and aesthetic developments related to popular music genres in mediated and transnational contexts.

Her research interests include the role of women in jazz and popular music and the ways that performance practice is attuned to audiovisual media technologies and cultural ideologies. She has published widely on popular music video, gender and music, jazz in film and television, and more recently music and ecology in the urban forest. Her book  Some Liked it Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928-1959 (Wesleyan University Press 2009) was nominated for a TLA Richard Wall Memorial Award recognizing scholarly writing on cinema and recorded performance and the American Musicological Society's Lewis Lockwood Award. Her monograph Remixing European Jazz Culture was published by Routledge in 2020. In 2019, she co-edited Beyoncé in the World: Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times with Christina Baade, which was awarded Co-honourable Mention for the 2023 Ellen Koskoff Best Edited Volumbe Prize.

From 2013 to 2019, she chaired the Benelux chapter of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM Benelux) and has served on the boards of KVNM (The Royal Society for Music History of the Netherlands) and the Dutch Festival Monitorcommissie for the Raad voor Cultuur. She also chaired the Centre for Gender Studies from 2020-2024 where she co-initiated the gender and sexuality minor at the Univeristy of Groningen. She was co-editor for a special issue on Beyoncé in Popular Music and Society and media editor of Jazz Perspectives. She is also active with the Arts in Society Research Center and the Society for Ethnomusicology.

As a professional musician, composer, and saxophonist, Kristin has performed in a number of groups in Chicago and Groningen including Los Toallitas, Funkadesi, The Blue Turtle Tea Party, Redmoon Puppet Theatre, the University of Chicago X-Tet, The Northwestern Big Band, the Hericane Saxophone Quartet, the Tinsel Trio and the multi-arts collective Hora Est. 

She acquired her Masters in Saxophone Performance at Northwestern University under Fred Hemke and her PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago with a Franke Dissertation Writing Fellowship under the supervision of Phil Bohlman (with Martin Stokes, Ron Radano, and Jacqueline Stewart).

In 2013, she organized the first ever University of Groningen Big Band for students to perform big band arrangements from a variety of periods. In 2013, she also initiated the Music Matters series, a lunch-time concert and lecture series aimed at bridging the larger community of Groningen to the academic community of the University of Groningen.