Rate My Professor Natalie Zelensky

Natalie Zelensky serves as Associate Professor of Music and Co-Chair of the Music Department at Colby College, a position she has held since joining the faculty in 2012. She earned her Ph.D. in music studies from Northwestern University, graduating with honors. Her research centers on ethnomusicology, with a particular emphasis on Russian music, diasporas, nostalgia, American popular music and culture, and Cold War politics. Specific areas of specialization include Russian popular and sacred music in New York City, Russian-American summer camps, underground sacred music in the Soviet Union, Franco-American music culture in Maine, and racial representation, gender, and marketing in the Classic Blues. Zelensky's scholarship explores the Russian Vogue of the 1920s, the integration of Russian music into Hollywood films and sheet music, the role of Russian émigrés in U.S. anti-communist Cold War propaganda, and how subsequent generations of Russian-Americans use stylized folk music and dances to maintain ties to an idealized homeland.

Zelensky has published articles and conference papers in Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of the Society for American Music, The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, and Russia Abroad: Music and Orthodoxy. Her monograph, Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination, was published by Indiana University Press in 2019, with a Russian translation released by Academic Studies Press in 2023. She co-authored the instructor’s manual for Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development (Prentice-Hall, 2008 and 2012 editions) and contributed translations and footnotes to W.W. Norton’s 2011 edition of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Among her honors, Zelensky received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2013 to participate in Columbia University’s Harriman Institute program on America’s Russian-Speaking Immigrants and Refugees. At Colby, she teaches courses such as Introduction to World Music, From Rockabilly to Grunge: A History of Rock 'n' Roll, and Music in Life, Music as Culture: Introduction to Ethnomusicology. She has also led humanities labs on Maine’s Musical Soundscapes in 2014, 2015, and 2018, fostering student ethnographic research on local musical traditions.