Mark Katz (Professor and Chair) holds degrees from the College of William and Mary (B.A. in philosophy) and the University of Michigan (M.A., Ph.D. in musicology). Before joining the faculty at UNC, he taught at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University (1999-2006). His scholarship focuses on music and technology, contemporary popular music, and the violin. He has written three books, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (2004, rev. ed. 2010), The Violin: A Research and Information Guide (2006), and Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ. He co-edited (with Timothy Taylor and Anthony Grajeda) the collection Music, Sound, and Technology in America. He is the editor of Journal of the Society for American Music, a senior editor for Oxford Handbooks Online, and a member of the National Recording Preservation Board.
Professor Katz teaches courses on music and technology, popular music, and modern art music. In 2011 he received an Innovation grant from UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities to expand the scope and reach of university-level music pedagogy. One result of this grant was the creation of a new course, Beat Making Lab. Aimed at students without formal musical training, the course is co-taught with professional musicians and combines instruction in composition, entrepreneurship, and history. Read more about this project here.
Professor Katz lectures frequently on music to academic and non-academic audiences. He has been a guest speaker at universities and other institutions throughout the U.S. and Europe, with recent invited talks and keynote lectures at Cambridge, Guelph, Harvard, Minnesota, Oxford, and the Sacher Stiftung. He also addresses general audiences through radio, newspaper, and blog interviews, pre-concert lectures, website chats, and engagements at the Smithsonian Institution, the British Library, the North Carolina Science Festival, and elsewhere.
Mark Katz is a long-time violinist, an amateur turntablist, and a DJ at UNC’s radio station, WXYC 89.3 FM.
Katz, along with producer/DJ Apple Juice Kid founded the Beat Making Lab in 2011. Professor/MC Pierce Freelon joined Apple Juice to co-teach the popular class in 2012.
