About Cana

Cana (KAY-nuh) is a musicologist, writer, and environmentalist. She is entering her final year as a PhD Candidate in Historical Musicology at Harvard University, and is eager to pursue career opportunities in tenure-track roles, post-doctoral fellowships, and academic publishing.

Cana’s scholarship revolves around how music and sound help us make sense of our multispecies relationships and of our 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 dissertation explores what she terms “botanical musicalities,” which refers to the ways that music appears in moments of human-plant encounter. Her case studies range from the representation of botanical scents in 19th-century French art song; ambient music made through bio-sonification; and the performativity of online plant mom culture. Her research has been generously supported by Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center and the Center for European Studies.

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 Substack reflections about achieving balance as a junior scholar. 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 contact Cana.