Biography

• MA and PhD, critical and comparative studies in music, University of Virginia
• GC, gender studies, University of Georgia
• MA, musicology, University of Georgia
• BM, vocal performance, University of North Georgia

Doktor’s teaching and research examine how systematic forms of power contour musical sound. In her current book project, Reconstructing Whiteness: Race in the Early Jazz Marketplace (under contract with University of California Press), she evaluates how white supremacy profoundly shaped the emergence of the recording industry. Combining archival research with music analysis, she theorizes whiteness as both a cultural and economic construct that materialized across a variety of musical contexts from dance band arrangements and art music compositions to recording contracts and presentations of jazz in radio and film. Doktor argues that as minstrelsy declined in popularity, jazz became an essential site for suturing new expressions of white cultural dominance. Portions of this research appear in The Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies (2024), Open Access Musicology (forthcoming), and Beyond the Bandstand: Paul Whiteman in American Musical Culture, edited by W. Anthony Sheppard (University of Illinois, 2024). 

Doktor has published a number of peer-reviewed articles all centered on critiquing white supremacy in American musical contexts. Most recently, she returned to her master’s thesis on cross-gender cover songs in “On the Failure of White Feminism: When Björk and PJ Harvey Covered the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction,’” published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2024). Her articles “Finding Florence Mills: The Voice of the Harlem Jazz Queen in the Compositions of William Grant Still and Edmund Thornton Jenkins” (Journal of the Society for American Music, Fall 2020) and “How a White Supremacist Became Famous for His Black Music: John Powell's Rhapsodie Nègre (1918)” (American Music, Winter 2020) challenge the inherit biases of contemporary historical methods through music analysis. “Finding Florence Mills” was awarded the 2022 Irving Lowens Article Award by the Society for American Music for its “extraordinary use of this imaginative methodology,” which is “brilliantly executed and a model for future scholarship.” It was also awarded the 2021 Best Essay in Popular Music Scholarship by the Popular Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society for its “deep archival work and strong engagement with relevant, contemporary theorization.”

Doktor’s music theory courses ask, “How can we hear inequality?” In her classes, students discover how listening and analysis can be forms of activism. She has revised undergraduate and graduate theory curriculum to not only represent diverse voices but also expose how sexist, classist, and racist ideologies have determined which elements of music our institutions value and what methods we use to analyze them. As an alternative to part-writing and roman numeral analysis, Doktor guides students through microrhythmic and timbral analysis using spectrograms. These methods influence forthcoming essays on early jazz improvisation, contemporary jazz fusion, and modernist art composition. 

Her commitment to social change extends beyond classroom walls. She previously worked with the Debt Collective to create a network of colleges and universities taking a stand against student loan debt. She helped create the Jazz and Improvisation Study Group for the American Musicological Society to create safer and more equitable spaces for graduate students and early career as well as independent scholars. She currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Jazz Studies, working with the editorial board to prioritize alternative and underrepresented perspectives in the field. 

Prior to arriving at Temple, Doktor was a visiting assistant professor at Colorado College from 2019—2022, and she was the Raymond C. Morales Post-Doctoral Fellow in Jazz & Gender Studies at the University of Utah from 2017 to 2019. Since arriving, she was a Penn Faculty Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center (2023—2024) and is currently a Faculty Fellow at Temple’s Center for the Humanities (2024—2025).

Publications

Selected Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals and Chapters in Edited Books

“Black Music, White Bodies, Paul Whiteman’s Body,” Beyond the Bandstand: Paul Whiteman in American Musical Culture, edited by W. Anthony Sheppard, 17—44 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2024).

“Arranging Whiteness: The Gendered and Racialized Sounds of Early Jazz,” in Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies, edited by Ryan Bañagale (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190061869.013.13.

“On the Failure of White Feminism: When Björk and PJ Harvey Covered the Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 77, no. 1 (Spring 2024): 103—161.

“nocoastjazz,” co-authored with Charles Carson, Jazz & Culture 5, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2022): 1—20.

 “‘Jazz Can Exist Anywhere’: A Virtual Roundtable with Chaney Sims and Kris Johnson,” co-authored with Charles Carson, Jazz & Culture 5, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2022): 65—74.

“How a White Supremacist Became Famous for His Black Music: John Powell and Rhapsodie nègre (1918),” American Music 38, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 395—427.

“Finding Florence Mills: The Voice of the Harlem Jazz Queen in the Compositions of William Grant Still and Edmund Thornton Jenkins,” Journal of the Society for American Music 14, no. 4 (2020): 451—479.

• Winner of the Best Essay in Popular Music Scholarship, American Musicological Society
• Winner of the Irving Lowens Article Award, Society for American Music

“Beyond the Threshold: A Case Study of a Partnership between Students and Faculty Developers,” International Journal for Students as Partners 3, no. 1 (May 2019): 150—159.

“Edmund T. Jenkins, Afram (1924), and the New Negro Renaissance in and Beyond Harlem,” American Music Review XLV, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 7—12.