Performing Tsarist Russia in New York

Natalie K. Zelensky is an Associate Professor of Music at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Natalie’s research focus is on Russian music-making in New York within a broader framework of diaspora studies, nostalgia, and Cold War politics. She has published and presented conference papers on Russian popular and sacred music in New York City, Russian night clubs in New York, Russian-American summer camps, and underground sacred music in the Soviet Union as well as on American Classic Blues and Franco-American music in Maine. Natalie received a fellowship with the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2013 to participate in the Columbia University Harriman Institute’s “America’s Russian-Speaking Immigrants and Refugees: 20th-Century Migration and Memory.”