Joshua Bedford received a Bachelor of Music Education degree from Indiana State University (2011) and a Master of Arts in Musicology from the University of Georgia (2013). He recently earned his Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Georgia (2020) with a dissertation titled “Soviet Opera: Styles and Aesthetics under Stalin, 1929–1939.” He also holds a certificate in Women’s Studies from the Institute for Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia. Before joining the faculty at MTSU, he taught courses as the instructor of record for both the Hugh Hodgson School of Music and the Institute for Women’s Studies at UGA during his graduate studies, and he served as an Adjunct Instructor of Musicology at UGA after graduation. 

His main research area explores the relationship between Soviet and 19th-century Russian opera, the modernist synthesis of styles of the 1920s, and the aesthetic formation of socialist realism in the 1930s. Recently, he has shifted his research focus to laughter in opera. He has presented his research at regional, national, and international conferences, including the American Musicological Society annual conference, the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies, the Institute for Russian Music Studies Annual Conference in Vipiteno, Italy, and most recently at the Deutsche Schostakowitsch Gesellschaft musikwissenschaftliches Symposium. 

Other research interests include the Russian émigré composer Alexander Tcherepnin, American popular music, and music and film. His first publication was “The Features of Alexander Tcherepnin’s Nine-Step Scale and Its Use in the First Movement of His First Symphony,” in Analytical Approaches to 20th-Century Russian Music, edited by Inessa Bazayev and Christopher Segall (Routledge, 2020). 

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