Dr. Rose Bridges is an Instructor in Music in the Department of Music at the University of Mississippi.
Research Interests
anime, film and television music, music in contemporary Japan, popular music studies, music and identity, video game music, opera
Biography
Dr. Rose Bridges, a native of Detroit, MI, is a musicologist whose research focuses on film music and sound, popular music studies, opera and Japanese music, and is one of the leading scholars on music in Japanese anime. She is the author of the book 33 1/3 Japan: Yoko Kanno’s Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack (Bloomsbury Press, 2017) and has published articles or chapters on anime music in the journal Mechademia (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), the book The Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Japanese Animation (2024), and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Music in Television and Routledge Companion to LGBTQ+ Media. She received her Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Texas-Austin in 2022, and she holds previous degrees from Boston University and Peabody Conservatory. Her dissertation focused on constructions of gender and sexuality in anime soundtracks, and she is currently working on a book proposal that expands that research to examine how anime music constructs race, nationality, and religion. She also was a longtime anime critic for Anime News Network, the most-read English-language news site on Japanese popular media, and she has discussed anime and music on numerous podcasts and an online panel for the Japan Society NYC. Dr. Bridges previously taught music history courses on the Western classical tradition, popular music, film music, and contemporary Japanese music at UT-Austin, the University of Florida, Towson University, and Eastern Washington University, and has presented on these topics at a variety of national and international conferences. In her free time, she enjoys reading, creative writing, watching movies, gaming, learning new musical instruments and languages, drinking tea, and rooting for the Texas Longhorns and Detroit Tigers.
“Queer Musicalities in the Television Anime of Ikuhara Kunihiko.” In The Routledge Companion to LGBTQ+ Media. Eds. Maria T. Soto-Sanfiel and Maria-José Masenet. London and New York: Routledge (under contract).
Co-authored with Brooke McCorkle Okazaki. “Music and Anime in Japan.” In The Oxford Handbook to Music in Television. Eds. Ronald Rodman, James Deaville, and Jessica Getman. New York: Oxford University Press (under contract).
“Authorship in Music and Sound Design: Four Outstanding Cases in the Anime Industry, 1995-2016.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Music and Sound in Japanese Animation. Ed. Marco Pellitteri. Singapore: Palgrave, 2024. 453-480.
“The Sound That Races Through the End of the World: Musical Moments as Refrain and Revolution in the Anime of Ikuhara Kunihiko.” Mechademia 13, no. 2 (2021): 9-25. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/783794
33 1/3 Japan: Yōko Kanno’s Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2017.
Dissertations/Theses:
“Constructions of Gender, Sexuality and Identity in Contemporary Japanese Animation Soundtracks.” Ph.D. diss, University of Texas at Austin, 2022.
“The Legacy of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen As Reflected in Select Late 20th-Century and 21st-Century Film Media.” M.M. thesis, Boston University, 2015.
Courses Taught
- MUS 101 Student Recital
- MUS 301 History of Music
- MUS 302 History of Music II
- MUS 520 Introduction to Music Research
Education
BM Musicology and Composition NA, Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins Unive (2012)
MM Musicology and Composition NA, Boston University (2015)
Ph.D. Musicology and Composition NA, University of Texas at Austin (2022)