Shelina Louise Brown

Shelina Brown is a musicologist specializing in popular music, voice studies, gender and sexuality, and Japanese music. Her research examines the voice as a site of cultural and political meaning, with particular attention to experimental vocal practices, feminist and queer performance, punk and post-punk, and the 1960s counterculture. Her work draws on critical theory, feminist and queer theory, Asian and Asian American feminisms, Deleuzian feminisms, and psychoanalysis, with broader interests in twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history.

Her current book project, Queen of Noise: Yoko Ono’s Vocal Revolution, offers a comprehensive study of Yoko Ono’s voice and musical career, situating her radical vocal practices at the intersections of Japanese aesthetics, the Western avant-garde, rock, feminism, and diasporic identity. Raised in Kyoto, Japan, and bilingual in Japanese, Brown draws on Japanese-language sources and bicultural perspectives in her research on Ono and Japanese popular music. The book traces Ono’s influence across experimental music, punk, new wave, and post-punk, repositioning her within histories of popular music, experimental vocality, and women in rock.

Brown’s research extends beyond her work on Ono to questions of voice, gender, subculture, and cultural memory across popular and experimental music. Her scholarship on punk and new wave examines women’s experimental vocal practices and the ways performers such as Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen challenged conventions of gender, genre, and vocal expression. Other strands of her work explore hauntology and musical revivalism; multispecies approaches to music and sound; Japanese popular music, including enka and Vocaloid culture; and the intersections of music, feminist spirituality, and the 1960s counterculture. Her community-based research turns to contemporary underground music culture in Cincinnati. Through the University Honors Program's summer research project, she is currently working with undergraduate researchers to document and study the city’s youth music scenes, connecting her longstanding interests in subculture, independent music, and musical communities with locally based research.

Before entering academia, Brown was active for many years as a musician and recording artist in Los Angeles underground and independent music scenes. Her experience as a performer continues to inform her scholarship on voice, embodiment, musical subcultures, and experimental performance. At the University of Cincinnati, she teaches courses including Critical Theory and Music, Voice and Gender, Women in Rock, and the Music & Activism of Yoko Ono.

Brown regularly presents her research at national and international conferences, including those of the American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Association for Asian Studies, and Punk Scholars Network.

PhD: University of California, Los Angeles 2018 (Musicology, Certificate in Gender Studies)

Popular music; voice studies; gender and sexuality; critical theory; feminist and queer theory; psychoanalysis; Japanese popular music; punk, new wave, and post-punk; experimental music; 1960s counterculture; global music history.

Peer Reviewed Publications

Shelina Brown  (2026). “Of Insects and Interstices: A Multispecies Analysis of Yoko Ono’s ‘Fly’ (1970) and Its Improvised Vocal Soundtrack”. Music and the Moving Image, 19 (2) , 3 - 25More Information

Shelina Brown  (2026). "Turned Out Nice Again: Hauntological Revivalism in The Beatles Anthology and ‘Free as a Bird’ (1995)". Contemporary Music Review (Special Issue on Hauntology)More Information

Shelina Brown  (2026). "Zoe-Powered Pop: Historicizing the Feminist New Wave of Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen". Punk & Post-Punk, 15 (1) , 9 - 26More Information

Shelina Brown  (2026). "From ‘Bird Song’ to ‘Mother B/Earth’: The new wave vocal becomings of Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen". Punk & Post-Punk, 15 (2) , 179 - 197More Information

Shelina Brown  (2025). “A Witch’s Guide to the Underground: Sixties Counterculture, Dianic Wicca and the Cultural Trope of the ‘Witchy Diva’”. The Witch Studies Reader, edited by Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward, Duke University PressMore Information

Shelina Brown  (2025). "The World is Mine: Queer Affective Horizons in the Vocaloid Pop of Hatsune Miku". Singing Out: The Musical Voice in Audiovisual Media, edited by Catherine Haworth and Beth Carroll, Edinburgh University Press, 176 - 188

Shelina Brown  (2014). "Scream from the Heart: Yoko Ono's Rock and Roll Revolution". Countercultures and Popular Music, edited by Sheila Whiteley and Jedediah Sklower, Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series

Research Fellow, University Research Council, University of Cincinnati (URC)

Doctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)

AMS Career Development Grant in American Music

Soceity for Ethnomusicology (SEM) (Gender and Sexuality Studies Section ) Vice-Chair

Gender Studies and Music

Women in Rock

Music in Contemporary America

Critical Theory and Music

The Music and Activism of Yoko Ono

Voice and Gender

brown7sl@ucmail.uc.edu