Jade Conlee

Biography

Jade Conlee (she/her) is an interdisciplinary music scholar who studies racial and colonial politics in twentieth century American popular music and music theory. Her research asks how music and music theories mediate our relationships to race, place, and the natural world. Conlee’s work combines historical cultural study with music analysis and ethnography, and engages additional frameworks from Indigenous studies, critical philosophies of race, sound studies, media theory, and the environmental humanities. 

Her book project Hawai‘i Exotica: Sonic Cartographies of US Empire concerns a little-known genre of Hawaiian jazz marketed as “exotica” that was invented in the years leading up to Hawai‘i statehood in 1959. Hawai‘i Exotica explores how different historical actors used exotica to map their relationships to Hawaiian lands in ways that at times supported, and at other times contested, U.S. colonial expansion in the islands. As record companies promoted exotica with hi-fi and stereo sound, they aligned the expanded sonic possibilities of the hi-fi home with the global expansion of U.S. political influence in the Cold War. Meanwhile, tourist companies and Hawai‘i-based hotel developers used exotica to advertise the unique moods and atmospheres of Hawai‘i while seizing the island’s lands and resources. However, Hawai‘i Exotica argues that working class Puerto Rican and Indigenous exotica musicians imbued their music with counter-colonial perspectives tourist listeners wouldn’t recognize, including multinational histories of plantation labor and Kanaka Maoli stewardship of Hawai‘i plant and animal ecologies. Hawai‘i Exotica demonstrates how popular music performers and institutions use music to map, claim, and transform land in ways that can both further and contest imperial control. 

Conlee is also co-editor with Tatiana Koike of the edited volume Theorizing Music for Antiracist Futures: Terminology and Critical Methods, forthcoming in 2027 with the University of Michigan Press “Music and Social Justice” series. Drawing on postcolonial, Black, and Indigenous studies, the volume unpacks how basic terms like “pitch” and “scale” were shaped through historical involvement with eugenics and evolutionary theories of race. The volume offers a toolkit for scholars to use music analysis and discussions of music’s basic parameters as opportunities to pursue epistemic justice by honoring the conceptual diversity of global musics. An active supporter of anti-racist efforts in music theory, Conlee has also co-authored a review of Philip Ewell’s On Music Theory with Clifton Boyd for Music Theory Online in 2023. Her aural skills syllabus was the inaugural winner of the Society for Music Theory’s Diversity Course Design award in 2021. 

Conlee received her Ph.D. in Music Theory from Yale University in 2024 with ethnomusicologist Michael Veal as primary advisor. Her dissertation won the Society for American Music’s Housewright Dissertation Award in 2026. From 2024–2026, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Mellon Race, Place, and Equity program at the University of Virginia. Trained as a concert pianist specializing in contemporary and experimental music, Conlee holds a M.M. in Piano Performance from the University at Buffalo and a B.M. in Piano Performance from New York University. In 2015, she completed a Fulbright grant studying contemporary piano performance in Stuttgart, Germany.