Melissa Bilal

Melissa Bilal serves as The Promise Professor in Armenian Music, Arts, and Culture and Director of the Armenian Music Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), specializing in sociocultural anthropology and historical research at the intersection of music, gender, and memory.

Her academic credentials include:

• Ph.D. in Music (Ethnomusicology), University of Chicago
• M.A. in Sociology, Boğaziçi University
• B.A. in Sociology, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul

Dr. Bilal's research centers on music's role in Armenian memory transmission within Turkey and the musical-intellectual history of Armenians during the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. Her work critically examines gender dynamics and cultural resilience through ethnomusicological and anthropological frameworks, with particular focus on recovering marginalized narratives in Armenian feminist history.

Her scholarly output demonstrates consistent thematic focus on Armenian cultural heritage across Ottoman/post-Ottoman contexts, exemplified by her forthcoming co-authored volume Feminism in Armenian: An Interpretive Anthology (2025) which documents twelve Armenian feminist writer-activists. Current projects like the Koharik Gazarossian biography extend this trajectory into musical biography and composer studies.