Faculty

Clara Latham's research and creative practice focus on the relationship between sound, technology, and the labor. She has published articles in the Journal of Musicology, Sound Studies, Women & Music, Contemporary Modern European History, the Opera Quarterly, and the edited volume Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Instrument or Appliance? The Theremin, Gendered Labor, and the Origins of Electronic Music. Also active as a composer and performer, she has played in many Brooklyn based bands including the psychedelic prog rock bands Starring and New Pope. Her opera-drama about the birth of psychoanalysis, Bertha the Mom, was supported by the American Composers Forum and premiered at Roulette Intermedium in 2018. She is currently working on a collaboration with choreographer Juliana F. May on an evening length work that will premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November, 2025. During the 2023 - 2024 she was the Edward T. Cone member in Music Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. 

B.Mus in composition, Oberlin Conservatory, 2004.

Ph.D. in music, New York University, 2015.  

“Is a Vacuum Cleaner a Musical Instrument?” Solitude Journal V: A Sound was Heard, Spring 2024.

“Instrument or Appliance? Gender, Domesticity, and the RCA Theremin,” Journal of Musicology, Vol. 39, Issue 1, pp. 35 – 65, 2022.

“The Sound Machine in the Body: Cybernetics and the Theremin”, Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, Vol. 2, Number 4, pp 559 – 577, 2021.

“Unboxing timbre in the Behringer model D Synthesizer”, Sound Studies. An Interdisciplinary Journal, (5:2), 2019.

“How Many Voices Can She Have? Destabilizing Gender and Sexuality in Lulu”, Special issue on voice, edited by Emily Dolan, Opera Quarterly; Opera Quarterly (32:3), 2018.

“Listening to Modernism” review essay Contemporary European History: (26:2), 2017.

“Introduction”, The Limits of Hearing: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Vocal Materiality and Expression, edited by Clara Latham and J. Martin Daughtry, Music and Politics 9 (Summer, 2016).

“Rethinking the Intimacy of Voice and Ear: Hypnosis and Genital Massage in the Treatment of Hysteria”

Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 19, 2015.

“Listening to the Talking Cure: Sprechstimme, Hypnosis, and the Sonic organization of affect” in Sound, music, affect: theorizing sonic experience, edited by Ian Biddle and Marie Thompson, Continuum press, 2013.