Chase Castle is a cultural historian of music. He is currently a Robert M. Kingdon Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research concerns the social lives of music—how it plays out in ordinary experiences, how it transforms across space and time, how it contains a sensational power. Castle specializes in American religious music across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current book project, The Gospel in Black and White: Race and Popular Culture in American Hymns, uncovers African American and white musical influences in the formation of gospel hymns, a popular sacred genre that rose to prominence between 1875 and 1915. Unlike previous scholarship that often separates Black from white histories and treats African American music primarily in terms of spirituals, Castle’s research casts a wider net to consider how racial politics played out in pervasive, popular, sacred practices. His work explores archives, affect, and material culture to understand how music operates in historical phenomenology. Castle received a PhD in Music from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2024. He is also an active organist and choral conductor.
Curriculum Vitae
Education
Ph.D. Music
University of Pennsylvania
2024
B.M. Music History & Literature and Organ Performance
Baldwin Wallace University
2019
Publications
“Gothic Watts: Race and Conversion in Early American Hymnbooks,” in The Legacy of Isaac Watts’ Hymnody: Songs Before Unknown, ed. Martin V. Clarke and Daniel Johnson. Congregational Music Studies Series. New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2026.
“Musical Worlds and Soundways of Exchange,” Nineteenth-Century Music Review 22, no. 3 (forthcoming December 2025).
“Ghost Stories of the Archive: Material Legacies and Writing Music History,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 148, no. 3 (October 2024): 203-222.
“Sonic Domination and the Politics of Race in Southern Antebellum Hymnody,” Journal of the Society for American Music 17, no. 4 (November 2023): 383-405.
Reviewed in The Hymn 75, no. 2 (Spring 2024): 31.
“The voice of free grace cries escape to the mountain,” with Chris Fenner, Hymnology Archive, hymnologyarchive.com (15 February 2023).
Teaching
Appreciation of Music
Undergraduate Survey Course
Queer Perspectives on Popular Music
Undergraduate Topics Course
Materials and Methods of Research
Graduate Proseminar
Upcoming Talks
Society for American Music Annual Conference, Tacoma, Washington, “Gothic Hymns: Race and Emotion in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Music” (20 March 2025).
Sounding Spirit Singing School and Convening, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, “Black Entertainment Culture in Nineteenth-Century Hymnbooks” (4 April 2025).
Music, Research, and Activism II: Solidarities and Urgencies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland, “Battle Hymn of Anita Bryant: Gay Rights and Musical Activism in the United States” (15 May 2025).
Media
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