Daniel Castro Pantoja

• Assistant Professor
• Musicology

Fields

Music History of Colombia and Latin America, 1880-Present
Global Music History
Post-Foundational Political Theory
Populism Studies
Decolonial Music studies

Profile

I am a music scholar and cultural theorist with research interests in music and sound in Colombian state politics (1880-present), populism studies, decolonial studies, post-Marxist music studies, and global music history.
My current book project is “Bureaucratic Ears: Musical Intimacies during Colombia’s Populist Era,” a musicological study of the culture of Colombian partisan politics in state-funded music institutions during the early-twentieth century. As an editor, I am currently working with Olivia Bloechl, Hedy Law, Juliana M. Pistorius, and Jessica Bissett Perea, on the Oxford Handbook of Global Music History. I am also Area Editor (Northern South America) for the upcoming Grove Dictionary of Latin American and Iberian Music.

My dissertation, “Antagonism, Europhilia, and Identify: Guillermo Uribe Holguín and the Politics of National Music in Early Twentieth Century Colombia, won the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award (2020). I am the first Latino to receive this prize. My work has been published in journals such as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Latin American Research Review, TRANS-Transcultural Music Review, Latin American Music Review, Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal, the Journal of Musicology (forthcoming), and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy (forthcoming).

As a music scholar, I am also interested in the intersection between music studies and the museum world. I am a Smithsonian’s Latino Museum Studies Program alumni (2015). I have co-curated exhibitions such as Jacqueline Nova: Creación de la Tierra (2020), an immersive sound-based installation exhibited at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston; and Coleccionistas de sonidos: El álbum musical de Ana y Cristina Echeverría (2021), a digital exhibition funded by the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra and the District of Bogotá’s Program of Cultural Incentives. I often integrated museum experiences into my courses.

I joined the School of Music at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, having previously taught at the University of Houston and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá, Colombia). From 2020 to 2022, I was a Research Associate at the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music at UC Riverside. I am also currently a council member of the American Musicological Society (AMS) and co-chair of the AMS Global Music History Study Group. I hold a B.M. in Music Performance from Loyola University New Orleans, and M.M. in Classical Guitar Performance from the University of the Akron, and a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of California Riverside.

Selected Publications

Books and Journal Issues

Articles

Curatorial Work

Education & Training

• PhD, Musicology, University of California Riverside, 2018
• MM, Classical Guitar, The University of Akron, 2013
• B.M. Music Performance-Classical Guitar; Music Industry Studies Minor (Summa Cum Laude), Loyola University New Orleans, 2011