Rate My Professor Natalie Zelensky

She authored the monograph Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2019; Russian translation by Academic Studies Press, 2023), analyzing the politics and performance of Russian music in New York's aesthetic, commercial, and diasporic spaces, including nightclubs, concert stages, radio waves, sheet music, Hollywood films, and its role in U.S. anti-communist Cold War propaganda. Zelensky co-authored the instructor’s manual for Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development (Prentice-Hall, 2008, 2012) and assisted in translating and writing footnotes for W.W. Norton’s 2011 edition of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In 2013, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to join Columbia University Harriman Institute’s seminar on America’s Russian-Speaking Immigrants and Refugees: 20th-Century Migration and Memory. At Colby, Zelensky serves on the Center for the Arts and Humanities Executive Committee. She developed humanities labs like “Maine’s Musical Soundscapes: Ethnography of Maine,” which supported student projects, including one that won the Lise Waxer Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Paper from the Northeast Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her courses include Introduction to World Music, From Rockabilly to Grunge: A History of Rock 'n' Roll, and Music in Life, Music as Culture: Introduction to Ethnomusicology.