2024-2025

In addition to the academic-year fellows, we also support fellows who come to the ISM for a short time to do research in one of Yale’s unique collections. 

Fellows 2024-2025

James Blasina

James Blasina is Associate Professor in the Department of Music at Swarthmore College. His research focuses on chant and liturgy for the cults of saints in the European Middle Ages. His current book project, St Katherine of Alexandria in Music and Liturgy: The Rise of a Cult Across Medieval Europe investigates early repertories of chant for St. Katherine in Normandy and England, and their impact on establishing the later transcontinental cult. During his short-term ISM fellowship, James will be consulting medieval liturgical manuscripts in the Beinecke Library, and MS 843, a sixteenth century versified narrative of the story of St Katherine intended for an audience of Dominican nuns, in considering the relationship between the earliest liturgical traditions of St Katherine and later recastings.

Barbara Crostini

Barbara Crostini is lecturer in Ecclesiastical History, Art History and Cultural Studies at the Newman Institute, Uppsala, Sweden, and Adjunct Professor in Greek at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University. In researching Byzantine iconoclasm she was captured by the paintings of the synagogue at Dura Europos and is writing a book provisionally entitled “City of Stars: the Dura synagogue as performative space” (Cambridge University Press). At Yale she will consult materials from the Dura excavations that reveal theatrical aspects of this city as well as study the papyri from Dura in the Beinecke Library.

Adriana Sarbova

Adriana Sarbova is an architect with a Ph.D. in the theory and history of architecture, and assistant professor at the Institute of Balkan Studies and Center of Thracology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia. Her research interests comprise Thracian cult architecture and contemporary sacred spaces. Her book (in press) Architectural Dialogues: Thracian Cult Buildings in the Context of Contemporary Sacred Spaces explores two main questions: the reliance of contemporary sacred space design on models found in ancient cult buildings and communication with nature as achieved through the building’s architectural conception. Her project at Yale, The New Sacred Space: Architectural Features of a ‘Contemporary Solar Cult’ is a next step in this research. She introduces a new term, contemporary solar cult, which refers to the deployment of different artistic and architectural forms to transform the observation of the sun into a process of reflection, meditation, and even a kind of sacred experience, like for example the works of James Turrell and Not Vital. During her short-term fellowship she will focus on the work of architects Eero Saarinen and Louis Kahn represented in the holdings of the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University Library, and in particular these architects’ sacred buildings and the inspiration they found in the architecture of ancient Egypt and Greece.

Meri Haami

Meri Haami received her Ph.D. from Victoria University of Wellington – Te Herenga Waka studying the relationship between the Whanganui River, her Indigenous communities, and their Indigenous songs. Meri belongs to the Indigenous Māori tribal nations of Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi, Ngāti Rangi, Ngā Rauru Kītahi, and Ngāti Tūwharetoa and has regional and ethnic affiliations across Southeast Asia, specifically Singapore. Her fellowship called, He Whiringa Māramatanga: Indigenous Māori music and healing examines how Indigenous Māori creative expressions through song interconnect to the health and well-being of Māori by drawing on international archival material of customary Māori music knowledge. Indigenous Māori music is considered both casual and sacred, containing unique key elements of its own musical theories through forms such as waiata (songs), karakia (prayers), ruruku (incantations), haka (posture dances), pūrākau (stories), whakapapa (genealogies) and many more. These oral forms, which have been recorded and archived across the globe, have the potential to benefit Māori in reconnecting to their music traditions and identities, thus improving their overall well-being. Meri works in a range of interdisciplinary Kaupapa Māori research that includes, health, the environment, decolonisation, ethnomusicology, and ecomusicology. Meri works for a development and liberation organisation based in Waitara, Aotearoa/New Zealand called Tū Tama Wāhine o Taranaki focused on healing Māori.

Nastasia Heckendorff

Nastasia Heckendorff is a postdoctoral researcher at the Alban Berg Foundation in Vienna. Her main research interests include music culture in the early modern period, opera and music theatre with a focus on the 17th century and the early 20th century, as well as authorship and artistic creative processes. In 2024, she received a Ph.D. in Music History from the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar and the University Friedrich Schiller Jena (Germany) with a dissertation on the complex interactions between opera and politics in Marco Marazzoli’s stage works. Her ISM project examines Christian allegories in 17th century sacred operas. During that period, theological concepts such as Soul and Innocence, embodied by emotionally stirring figures, populated theater stages. Based on the assumption that “coding” and “decoding” of these concepts in the medium of opera functioned as a practice of communication, the project investigates their political and cultural significance. View a full bio here.

Emma Wimberg

Emma Wimberg is a current Ph.D. candidate in musicology at the University of North Texas with a related field in ethnomusicology. Her research areas include early twentieth-century music, Choctaw hymnody, organ music, and intersections of sacred and secular music. During her time as a short-term fellow at the ISM, she will be researching documents that discuss the changing musical and religious lives of the Choctaw throughout their removal from Mississippi to Oklahoma. This project will utilize collections in the Beinecke that contain daily accounts of life in the government schools, an extensive collection of letters between Choctaw leaders and missionaries, and other documents from this time period in order to create a clearer picture of how the introduction of Christianity interacted with and altered existing musical practices.