Chase Castle

I am a historian of American music, religion, and popular culture. I am a 2026–2027 Kluge Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. My research concerns the social lives of music: how sound gathers force in ordinary experiences, moves across space and time, and organizes attention, feeling, and power. I specialize in nineteenth-century U.S. musical culture, with an emphasis on vernacular sacred song and the infrastructures that shaped it, such as print, pedagogy, and institutions that promoted public singing. My current book project, The Gospel in Black and White: Race and Popular Culture in American Hymns (under contract with the University of North Carolina Press), traces the formation of gospel music between 1875 and 1915. It shows how gospel emerged from overlapping Black and white evangelical interests in publishing, performance, and listening, and treats hymnbooks and songbooks as material archives that both produced and preserved cultural categories like race. More broadly, my work spans American music history from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, with interests in race and racialization, print culture and media history before recording, and the entanglement of religion and popular culture. My articles are published or forthcoming in venues such as the Journal of the Society for American Music and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. I received a PhD in Music from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024, where I also taught, and have taught at the University of Delaware. I am also an organist and choral conductor.

Curriculum Vitae

Education

 

Ph.D. Historical Musicology
University of Pennsylvania
2024

B.M. Music History & Literature and Organ Performance
Baldwin Wallace University
2019

 

Dissertation:The Gospel in Black and White: Race and Power in American Evangelical Hymnody, 1840–1900
(Honorable Mention, Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award, Society for American Music, 2026)

 
 

Writing

 
 

Teaching

Appreciation of Music
Undergraduate Survey Course

Queer Perspectives on Popular Music
Undergraduate Topics Course

Materials and Methods of Research
Graduate Proseminar

Talks

Stowe in Context and Conversation, Trinity College, “Genre and the Sonic Construction of Race in Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (April 18, 2026)

Society for U.S. Intellectual History, University of Wisconsin–Madison, “Sounding Belief in Early America” (November 13, 2026)

American Musicological Society, virtual, “Singing and Selling Salvation: Gospel Quartets, Show Business, and Popular Religion in Nineteenth-Century America” (November 20, 2026)

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Media

Improvisation on "Precious Lord"
Tindley Temple, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
"Cantatas for the People": George Root, Fanny Crosby, and the Making of American Secular Cantata
Baldwin Wallace University, Berea, Ohio
Final from Symphony No. 1, Op. 14 (Louis Vierne)
Old Dutch Church, Kingston, New York
Balm in Gilead (Homage to Mahler)
First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Contact

Please direct correspondence to chasecastle@live.com,
or use the form here.

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