Zen has been asked to be a contributing author in the Sounding Spirit project, a musicological database sponsored by Emory University and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This digital library focuses on southern vernacular sacred songbooks published between 1850 and 1925.
I contributed a chapter on Virgil Thomson and Shape-Note Hymnody in this peer-edited volume published by Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Edited by Andrew Shenton and Joanna Smolko.
(Courtesy of the Brandeis University website)
Zen has been awarded the 2021 Provost Dissertation Fellowship Award for his document, “Englishness, Jewishness, and the English Sound: Gerald Finzi and the English Musical Renaissance.”
Zen is a 2021 recipient of a Graduate Travel & Research Award from the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis University. This award will assist in funding a research trip to the UK in July 2021, where Zen will be in residence at libraries and archives across the United Kingdom researching antisemitism “between the Wars” and how it relates to the reception of the composer Gerald Finzi.
I graduated with my M.F.A. in Musicology in May 2021.