About Cana

Cana (KAY-nuh) is a musicologist, writer, and environmentalist. She currently serves as the Assistant Professor of Music History & Ethnomusicology at Claflin University, covering general education courses and the entire music history sequence for Music Majors as part of the department’s NASM-certified program. She graduated from Harvard University in 2026 with her PhD in Historical Musicology and a Secondary Field specialization in the History of Science.

Cana’s scholarship revolves around how music and sound help us make sense of our multispecies relationships and experiences with more-than-human Nature. Across her research and teaching, she grapples with how to engage with music and sound amidst global environmental crises. Her first book project, provisionally titled Making Plants Musical, explores the figuration of musical and sonic plant life in the context of the modern environmental movement since the 19th-century. This work emerges from her dissertation research on “botanical musicalities,” a term that she coined to refer to the ways that music mediates affective encounters among Humans and plants.

Originally from Atlanta, she received her Bachelor’s of Arts in Music and French Studies from Emory University. Her undergraduate studies culminated in an Honors thesis about music, poetry, and linguistic nationalism in fin-de-siecle France and Belgium. While working on this project, she was part of an inaugural cohort of undergraduate fellows with the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and the Halle Institute.

To accompany her academic work, she pursues other writing projects in the form of short stories and narrative nonfiction reflections on navigating life as a junior scholar on Substack. When she isn’t writing or researching, Cana also enjoys long distance running, choral singing, and freestyling plant-based recipes.

For a more detailed list of her engagements, please visit the CV page or feel free to be in touch!