Shelina Louise Brown is a musicologist, musician, and recording artist whose work explores popular and experimental music, voice, gender and sexuality, and Japanese music and culture. Her research approaches the voice as a site of cultural and political meaning, with particular interests in experimental vocality, feminist and queer performance, punk and post-punk, and the countercultures of the 1960s and beyond. Her scholarship draws on feminist and queer theory, Asian and Asian American feminisms, critical theory, and psychoanalysis.

Her current book, Queen of Noise: Yoko Ono’s Vocal Revolution, examines Yoko Ono’s radical vocal practices at the intersections of Japanese aesthetics, the Western avant-garde, rock, feminism, and diasporic identity. Raised in Kyoto and bilingual in Japanese, Shelina brings Japanese-language sources and a bicultural perspective to her work on Ono and Japanese popular music. Her wider research ranges from women’s experimental vocal practices in punk and new wave to Japanese popular and experimental music, musical revivalism and cultural memory, and the relationship between music, subculture, and identity.

Before entering academia, Shelina spent a decade as a musician and recording artist in Los Angeles’s underground and independent music scenes. That experience continues to shape her approach to music as both a scholar and practitioner, particularly her interest in voice, embodiment, performance, and the social worlds that form around independent and experimental music.

At the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Shelina Brown is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Affiliate Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She teaches courses including Voice and Gender, Women in Rock, Critical Theory and Music, and The Music & Activism of Yoko Ono.