Kira Dralle

Kira Dralle is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She completed her PhD in Cultural Musicology at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2022, where she taught courses in jazz and hip hop. As a recipient of the prestigious UC President’s Dissertation Fellowship, she was recognized for her rigorous scholarly contributions, in addition to her pointedly activist aims of racial diversity in music academia.

In 2020, Kira was a Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Institute for Jazz Research at the Kunstuniversität Graz, working in the jazz archives of Dietrich Schulz-Köhn. Kira has lectured internationally at the University of Vienna, the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz, and has participated in many public musicology projects in Prague, Amsterdam, and with the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Austria. At the intersection of Historical Ethnomusicology and Visual Culture, her dissertation examined archival silence surrounding Black jazz musicians in the Third Reich, as well as the continued effects on transatlantic jazz historiography, canonization, and the racial imaginary.

Kira recently worked in curation and publications for Indexical, an interdisciplinary and experimental music venue in Santa Cruz, where she curated the Black Sound Symposium – a symposium full of concerts, talks, workshops, and interdisciplinary dialogue rooted in Black sound and Black sonic space. It worked to expand anti-racist and activist pedagogy and methodologies in and outside of academic institutions, and it honored the long and rich lineages of Black virtuosity that have been diminished and erased from artistic canons and social consciousness. The Black Sound Symposium was sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UCSC and the Visualizing Abolition public scholarship series at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.

Kira has published works in Jazz & Culture, Jazz Research News (Austria), Ethnomusicology Review, with The Center for New Music (San Francisco), and Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, and she has forthcoming publications with Jazzforschung / Jazz Research, and the Journal of Jazz Studies.