Dr. Ashley A. Greathouse is an interdisciplinary scholar operating at the intersections of (ethno)musicology, music theory, cultural history, and sociology. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music History at the University of South Carolina. Her work spans a broad range of cultural and musical/sonic topics, from eighteenth-century Britain to the present-day metaverse, all viewed through the lens of social performativity. Her 2024 PhD dissertation—“Urbane Promenades and Party-Jangling Swains: Music and Social Performativity in London’s Pleasure Gardens, 1660–1859”—critically examines the intersections of music, class, and gender in Britain’s most significant urban outdoor venues during the long eighteenth century. It highlights shifts in class- and gender-based power while also exposing how the prevalence of patriotic whitewashing in pleasure garden art and music helped mask the leisure economy’s imperialist underpinnings.

Greathouse’s publications include book and album reviews in Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press) and Nineteenth-Century Music Review (ibid.) and a co-authored chapter about title sequence music in streaming historical drama series for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music and Television. She is currently undertaking interdisciplinary projects on the English pleasure gardens and on extended reality rhythm/dance games.

She has presented extensively at (inter)national (ethno)musicological and interdisciplinary conferences, including meetings of the American Handel Society, the American Musicological Society, the American and International Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Music and the Moving Image, the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, and the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Greathouse has served on numerous conference committees and on the boards of the North American British Music Studies Association, the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, and the Haydn Society of North America. She is also a co-founder and core organizer of the annual AMS/SMT After Dark comedy panel and a past president of the Cincinnati Contra Dancers, a local 501(c)(3) nonprofit. She is a soprano and an active instrumental performer on bassoon, clarinet, harp, and piano.

Education

• PhD, Musicology—University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (2024)
• MMus, Music Theory—University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (2016)
• BMus, Music Education—Colorado State University (2012)

Research Areas

• Social performativity
• Soundscapes (sonic environments)
• Cultural, artistic, and musical life in eighteenth-century Britain
• Eighteenth-century music
• Film and television music
• Extended reality (XR) rhythm/dance games
• Progressive rock and heavy metal