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Rate My Professor Natalie Zelensky

Colby College

Ratings & reviews

5.08/20/2025

Encourages critical thinking and analysis.

5.04/30/2025

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About Natalie

Natalie Zelensky serves as Associate Professor of Music and Co-Chair of the Music Department at Colby College, a position she has held since joining the faculty in 2012. She earned her Ph.D. in music studies from Northwestern University, graduating with honors. Her research centers on ethnomusicology, with a particular emphasis on Russian music, diasporas, nostalgia, American popular music and culture, and Cold War politics. Specific areas of specialization include Russian popular and sacred music in New York City, Russian-American summer camps, underground sacred music in the Soviet Union, Franco-American music culture in Maine, and racial representation, gender, and marketing in the Classic Blues. Zelensky's scholarship explores the Russian Vogue of the 1920s, the integration of Russian music into Hollywood films and sheet music, the role of Russian émigrés in U.S. anti-communist Cold War propaganda, and how subsequent generations of Russian-Americans use stylized folk music and dances to maintain ties to an idealized homeland.