Lisa Pollock Mumme

Lisa is a PhD candidate who studies gender and sexuality in music. She primarily works on film music, particularly science fiction, horror, and action film. Her master’s thesis at the University of Iowa, “Not Things: Gender and Music in the Mad Max Franchise,” combined scholarship on gender in film music, film genre studies, and feminist film theory to analyze the gendered implications in the score of a masculine-dominated dystopian franchise. In her PhD work at Washington University in St. Louis, Lisa concentrates on gender and sexuality in horror film music. Lisa has published her work on Mexican soprano, composer, and businesswoman Ángela Peralta (1845-1883) in The Opera Journal. She has presented papers at Music and the Moving Image, International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Popular Culture Association, National Opera Association Annual Conference, American Musicological Society Midwest chapter meeting, and graduate student conferences.

Conference Presentations

2023-2024
"Lips to Whisper Lies: The Witch's Voice in Film"
Music and the Moving Image, New York University

"Open Heart: Pre-Exisitng Music as the Witch's Voice in The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)"
International Association for the Study of Popular Music, Philadelphia

"Do Not Listen!: The Witch's Threatening Vocality in American Horror Film"
Popular Culture Association, Chicago

2022-2023
"Death on the Road: Music and the Deaths of Women in the Mad Max Film Franchise"
Music and the Moving Image, New York University 2020-2021

"'Lookin' Sad but Lookin' Pretty': Country Spectacle and Queer Cowboys"
CUNY Graduate Studies in Music Conference, City University of New York (Virtual)

"'You know the tune so the words don't matter': Queer Country and Masculine Pageantry"
PopCon, Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, New York University (Virtual)

"Spectacular Masculinity and Queer Cowboy Performance in Recent Country Music Videos"
Music and the Moving Image, New York City (Virtual)

2019-2020
"Death on the Road: Music and the Deaths of Women in the Mad Max Film Franchise"
(Video Essay) Midwest Graduate Music Consortium, University of Iowa

2018-2019
“‘Angelica di voce’: Ángela Peralta as Nineteenth-Century Diva”
National Opera Association Annual Conference, Salt Lake City, UT

“‘Crazy About You’: Narrative Agency Through Onscreen Performance in Mad Max (1979)”
American Musicological Society, Midwest Chapter Meeting, University of Illinois at Chicago

Publications
December 2019
The Opera Journal, National Opera Association
“‘Angelica di voce’: Ángela Peralta as Nineteenth-Century Diva”