Stephanie Doktor

Stephanie Doktor is an Assistant Professor at Temple University's Boyer College of Music and Dance, specializing in Music Theory. Her work interrogates how power structures shape musical sound, with a focus on white supremacy in the early jazz marketplace and gender dynamics in cross-cultural musical contexts.

• Education: PhD and MA in Critical & Comparative Studies (University of Virginia), Graduate Certificate in Gender Studies (University of Georgia), MA in Musicology (University of Georgia), BM in Vocal Performance (University of North Georgia).

Her current book project, Reconstructing Whiteness: Race in the Early Jazz Marketplace (under contract with University of California Press), analyzes whiteness as a cultural and economic construct in jazz's emergence. She combines archival research with spectrogram-based music analysis to expose systemic biases in historical methodologies and pedagogy.

Recent publications include analyses of Paul Whiteman's racialized soundscapes (2024), critiques of white feminism in rock covers (2024), and studies of John Powell's racial appropriation (2020). Her work has earned the Irving Lowens Article Award (2022) and Best Essay in Popular Music Scholarship (2021).

• Scientific Awards
  • Irving Lowens Article Award (2022)
  • Best Essay in Popular Music Scholarship (2021)

Doktor revises music theory curricula to center marginalized voices, emphasizing microrhythmic and timbral analysis over traditional methods. She founded the Jazz and Improvisation Study Group for the American Musicological Society and serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Jazz Studies, prioritizing underrepresented perspectives.

Current grants include Faculty Fellowships at Temple University's Center for the Humanities (2024–2025) and the University of Pennsylvania's Wolf Humanities Center (2023–2024). She previously worked with the Debt Collective to address student loan debt and co-founded collaborative initiatives for equitable academic spaces.