Billy Coleman

William Coleman
Associate Director, Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy
404B Jesse Hall
573-882-3330
Bio

Billy Coleman is Associate Director of the Kinder Institute, teaches and co-coordinates the Kinder Honors sequence in Revolutions and Constitutions, and directs the Kinder Institute Democracy Lab. He is the author of Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788-1865 (University of North Carolina Press)—winner of the American Musicological Society’s H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Award. And his research exploring the relationship between music and politics in early America also appears in the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of the Early Republic, and Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature. He was Book Reviews Editor of American Nineteenth Century History for five years and recently co-edited a special issue on music in American nineteenth-century history for the same publication. Dr. Coleman completed his Ph.D. in History at University College London (UCL) and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Kinder Institute and the University of British Columbia before returning to the Kinder Institute in 2020. Born in Houston, Texas, he grew up in Sydney, Australia, where he graduated with a BA(Hons) in history and politics from the University of New South Wales (UNSW).