ABOUT US
Meet the team!
Will Buckingham
Executive Director
William D. Buckingham is a New Orleans-based researcher, educator, writer, and musician. He is a founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Ethnomusicology. His doctoral dissertation was the first book-length study on the Isleño décima, a unique tradition of Spanish folk song from southeastern Louisiana, in over twenty years, and he founded the Institute for Public Ethnomusicology in order to build on his research and experience to reach wider audiences and work to sustain this beautiful and threatened tradition.
Since 2023, Will has directed the Louisiana Décima Project, digitizing and publishing an archive of field recordings that documented the diverse Spanish language traditions of twentieth-century Louisiana, and has collaborated with repositories, copyright holders, community members, researchers, and other stakeholders to develop public-facing resources with these materials to support language revitalization and music sustainability efforts for Louisiana's Spanish-language traditions.
His research has been published in the Jazz Archivist and Louisiana History, and he holds degrees in jazz studies and musicology from Tulane University, the MLIS and certificate in archival studies from Louisiana State University, and the PhD in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago.
Hannah Rogers
Executive Director
Executive Director Hannah Rogers is an ethnomusicologist whose research uses the global(izing) phenomenon of tourism to theorize contemporary musical identities and relationships between sound, people, ideas, and places. With a longstanding focus on the public relevance of ethnomusicology, she has interned at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and worked in various capacities – mainly archival – at Maryland Traditions, Maryland’s state folklife program. While earning her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, she taught courses on world music and coordinated EthNoise!, the ethnomusicology workshop. Pursuing her passion for interdisciplinarity, she has taught a Heritage Tourism course for the Cultural Heritage Management Program at the Johns Hopkins University Krieger School for Advanced Studies since 2019.
Hannah holds a B.A. from Eugene Lang College and an M.A. in the Humanities and Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago. Her dissertation is titled “Resounding Archipelagoes: Music and Tourism in New Orleans and Havana.” She lives in New Orleans and recently co-authored the Oxford Bibliography of Music and Tourism (forthcoming).
Em Lessley
Archivist
Em Lessley is a New Orleans based archivist, primarily responsible for the creation and maintenance of the Louisiana Décima Project’s digital repository. They have a strong commitment to community-centered archival practices, equitable access, and the preservation of underrepresented histories. Em brings hands-on experience working with community archives, ethnographic audio collections, and cultural heritage materials across the Gulf South. Additionally, Em is appointed as the Director of the Archivist-At-Large project, an ongoing collaboration with the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana’s Cemonia Strother Williams Library Research Center, which involves working with CERC staff on processing their extensive physical and digital collections of cultural heritage materials related to the Tunica-Biloxi Indian Tribe. This project serves as a model for collaborations between small cultural heritage organizations with significant archival collections and organizations with professional archivists on staff seeking to broaden their impact.
They also work as the Archives Project assistant at Loyola University, working with archivists on staff in support of day-to-day activities, such as collection processing, reference requests, and exhibit curation. Em holds a Bachelor's degree from Oregon State University in Gender/Sexuality studies, MLIS from Louisiana State University, and a certificate in Archival studies from Louisiana State University.