Rate My Professor Natalie Zelensky

Natalie Zelensky is an Associate Professor of Music and Co-Chair of the Music Department at Colby College, where she joined the faculty in 2012 and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2019. She earned her Ph.D. in music studies with honors, M.M. in musicology, and B.M. in piano performance from Northwestern University. Zelensky's research as an ethnomusicologist focuses on Russian music, diasporas, nostalgia, American popular music and culture, and Cold War politics. She investigates popular musical cultures of the Russian diaspora in the United States, including how immigrants and their descendants use music to sustain or reconstruct cultural identities. Her work covers 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, racial representation, gender, and marketing in the Classic Blues. Zelensky has published articles in Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of the Society for American Music, The Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities, Russia Abroad: Music and Orthodoxy, and The Musical Quarterly.

She authored the monograph Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2019; Russian translation by Academic Studies Press, 2023), analyzing the politics and performance of Russian music in New York's aesthetic, commercial, and diasporic spaces, including nightclubs, concert stages, radio waves, sheet music, Hollywood films, and its role in U.S. anti-communist Cold War propaganda. Zelensky co-authored the instructor’s manual for Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development (Prentice-Hall, 2008, 2012) and assisted in translating and writing footnotes for W.W. Norton’s 2011 edition of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In 2013, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to join Columbia University Harriman Institute’s seminar on America’s Russian-Speaking Immigrants and Refugees: 20th-Century Migration and Memory. At Colby, Zelensky serves on the Center for the Arts and Humanities Executive Committee. She developed humanities labs like “Maine’s Musical Soundscapes: Ethnography of Maine,” which supported student projects, including one that won the Lise Waxer Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Paper from the Northeast Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her courses include Introduction to World Music, From Rockabilly to Grunge: A History of Rock 'n' Roll, and Music in Life, Music as Culture: Introduction to Ethnomusicology.