Chloe Smith

Chloe Smith is a fourth-year PhD Candidate in Music History. Her research centers on American folk music traditions, popular music, and regional studies of the U.S. South. Chloe’s dissertation (Old Times There are Not Forgotten: White Southern Nostalgia and Sonic Dimensions of Civil War Memory) explores the ways in which musical performances by ‘inheritors of the Confederacy’ articulate nostalgia for the Old South, harness Confederate ideology towards present political aims, and imagine white supremacist futures—from late 19th-century popular stages to contemporary Neo-Confederate protests.

Chloe has frequently returned to her M.A. thesis research (Yale, 2020) on the 1963 bombing at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The thesis placed the Afro-futurist jazz musician Sun Ra and his highschool band director John “Fess” Whatley within Black intellectual discourses responding to racial violence and segregation in the city. A recent iteration of this project (“Black Temporalities in the Wake: John Coltrane’s ‘Alabama’ and AMYRA’s ‘Burning in Birmingham’”) won the Mark Tucker award at the 2024 Society for American Music national conference.

Chloe completed a B.A. in History and Music in 2019 at Samford University in Birmingham. She is from Anniston, Alabama, and she has worked as a music teacher and violinist for several years.