Marianna is a pianist, teacher, and Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Anthropology, as well as the founder and host of Society of Sound Podcast.

Listen to Society of Sound Podcast on Spotify.

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Marianna is currently based in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is pursuing her doctorate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her research interests include popular music, (post)coloniality, and gender relations. She intends to research placemaking performed by women within the hip-hop scene of the French banlieue. Before moving to Madison, she was living in Bologna, Italy, conducting research on Italian music for the next season of Society of Sound Podcast — coming out soon!

After graduating from University of California, Berkeley with her bachelor’s degree in Music and French Literature in May 2020, Marianna spent her time as a piano instructor at Albany Music School. During this time she also created the Society of Sound Podcast. She is currently living in Bologna, Italy, collecting research on Italian music, and continuing to teach online for Albany Music School. She has a passion for language acquisition, cultural exchange, and music, and she has a deep interest in understanding how all three can combine.

Throughout her undergraduate career, Marianna combined her Music studies with her French studies by focusing her research on how popular music influenced social movements on gender politics in France. Her research is informed by French critical, feminist, and gender theorists. More broadly, she is interested in how popular music engages in political and social movements. Her smaller research projects include sound studies concerning how sonic and geographic space represent social place as well as research on how popular music can be used to portray narratives of domestic violence.