Cara Stroud

(she/her)

Assistant Professor of Music Theory

Cara Stroud is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, where she teaches courses in the undergraduate music theory core as well as graduate courses in popular music, music after 1900, and musical narrative. Her work on a variety of topics regarding twentieth-century music, including narrativity, intertextuality, the tarantella topic, nostalgia, form in Top-40 pop music, and revising the music theory curriculum has been presented at regional, national, and international conferences. Her work appears in the collection Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles: Analytical Pathways Toward Performance, edited by Gordon Sly and Michael Callahan, and in the journals Music Theory Spectrum, Engaging Students, and Music Theory Online. Dr. Stroud also has a chapter about Black composers in the post-tonal music theory curriculum in the collection Expanding the Canon: Black Composers in the Music Theory Classroom, edited by Melissa Hoag.