Biography

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

Doktor’s teaching and research examine how systematic forms of power contour musical sound. In her current book project, Reinventing 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. Using archival research and 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 have been solicited to appear in Oxford Handbook of Arrangement Studies, Open Access Musicology and Oxford Handbook of Jazz and Political Economy, and will also be featured in a co-edited special issue for Jazz & Culture. 

Her most recent publications, “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. “Finding Florence Mills” was 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.” It was also 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.”

Doktor’s courses ask, “How can we hear inequality?” In her classes, students discover how listening can be a form of activism in courses such as “Music, Power, & Inequality,” “The State of Jazz: NOLA,” “Black American Protest Music” and “Sonic Resistance in the Neoliberal Era.” Her commitment to social change extends beyond classroom walls. She works with the Debt Collective to create a network of colleges and universities taking a stand against student loan debt. 

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.