Billy Coleman is Associate Director of the Kinder Institute. A historian of politics and culture in early and nineteenth-century America, Billy is the author of Harnessing Harmony: Music, Power, and Politics in the United States, 1788–1865 (University of North Carolina Press), which won the American Musicological Society’s H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Book Award. He is coeditor, with J. M. Mancini, of Music in American Nineteenth Century History (Routledge) and his research articles appear, or are forthcoming, in the Journal of Southern History, Modern American History, Early American Studies, the Journal of the Early Republic, and Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature. His current book project is a comparative history of the idea of national music in early America and colonial Australia, and he is coediting a collection of essays with Lily Santoro and Jay Sexton on The United States at 250: Global Perspectives. Dr. Coleman completed a 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).