Research Collaborator
Harvard University
Dr. Monson won the Sonneck Society’s 1998 Irving Lowens Prize for the best book in American music for Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996). She was the editor of The African Diaspora: A Musical Prospective (2000) and the author of Freedom Sounds: Jazz, Civil Rights, and Africa, 1950-1967 (2007). She has published articles in Ethnomusicology, Critical Inquiry, World of Music, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women and Music, and the Black Music Research Journal. She was also a founding member of the nationally known Klezmer Conservatory Band, and plays trumpet with jazz and salsa bands. She has a PhD and an MA in musicology from New York University and a BM from New England Conservatory.