Holly Riley is a scholar, musician, and educator currently working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Teaching, Research, and Mentoring at the University of Montana’s Davidson Honors College. Her work spans questions of power, structure, and identity in American musics, with primary focuses on changing symbols of violence and safety in the country music industry, institution/community relationships in folk music in higher education, and experiential learning practices across arts education. She received her PhD in Ethnomusicology from Florida State University in 2020 and has spent most of the past decade working professionally as a fiddle player and songwriter alongside her academic pursuits.

Holly’s current projects include a forthcoming book proposal on symbols and sociopolitical alignment in country music, an article on scaffolded peer-review models in honors education, a quantitative review of gun and violence references in top-charting country songs, an article on Irish music, age, and community-building, and a series of experiential and interdisciplinary honors courses relating to music, culture, and community. If she’s not in her office or playing a show at the local brewery, you can find her sitting on the porch playing banjo or hiking with her dog Willie in her spare time.

Curriculum Vitae