About Nicol Hammond (SAChoirgirl)

CV (pdf)
Nicol Hammond is an assistant professor of cultural musicology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She grew up on the West Rand of Johannesburg, in Discovery, and lived for a while in New York City. Nicol received a BMus from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2006, an MA from NYU in 2012, and her PhD from NYU in 2014. She teaches graduate courses in research methods, queer and postcolonial music scholarship, gender, sexuality, and music, and listening, and she teaches undergraduate courses in popular music, music of the Southern hemisphere and the black Atlantic, music of the former British colonies, South African music, and music theory.
Nicol is a choral conductor and singer with a special interest in South African choral music. She has sung with the South African National Youth Choir, the West Gauteng Jeugkoor, the Johannesburg Bach Choir, the St. Martin's Singers, and the Wits Choir in South Africa, and with the New York Singers, the Stonewall Chorale, the NYU Community Choir, the Canterbury NYU Choir, the Dessoff Symphonic Choir in New York City, and the UC Santa Cruz Chamber Singers and University Choir. She conducted the Johannesburg Chamber Choir before she moved to New York, and was the UC Santa Cruz Chamber Choir conductor for Fall 2015.
Her research interests include the relationship between nationalism, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, in post-apartheid South Africa; popular music, ethnonationalism, and transnational capitalism; performances of race and gender in popular music; vocal music; listening; music theory and constructs of global centers and peripheries; music and sports; and musical tourism and heritage studies. She is currently working on a book on lesbian music fans in South Africa, and has begun a new research project on Afrikaans female singers and the co-construction of race and gender over the long 20th century. She has published articles and chapters on South African female musicians and narratives of mothering;  South African choral music as a nation-building endeavor since the end of apartheid; South African popular music negotiating post apartheid gender and ethnicity; and the relationship between African traditional and popular music in the transnational imaginary with particular reference to the 2010 Soccer World Cup. She completed a dissertation on Afrikaans rock musician Karen Zoid, who is both a national icon of post apartheid non-discrimination politics, and a role model for young Afrikaans lesbians negotiating their national identity within an increasingly hostile and violent nation. Nicol's research includes onsite and online ethnography, oral history, cultural studies, and archival research. Her work therefore brings together conventional and digital ethnography, theoretical analysis of traditional and popular music, sonic, visual, and textual analysis, and archival research, with socio-cultural analysis of a postcolonial nation in a transnational context.
She is motivated by a desire to understand how people make their lives more liveable, and a hope that she will ultimately be writing about the ways that people make their lives more joyful.