Pallas Catenella is a PhD candidate in musicology at the Eastman School of Music specializing in maritime music and nineteenth-century operatic technologies. Her master’s thesis, which examined the social and historical impacts of nautical preservation on the music of deepwater sailing culture, was supported by fellowships and awards from the Society for American Music, Mystic Seaport Museum, Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, and New England Chapter of AMS. Her dissertation is more technologically focused and explores the intersections of operagoing and nineteenth-century experiences of Pepper’s Ghost, opera glasses, ornithology, the aquarium, and olfactory experiences at the opera.

Outside of academia, Pallas has numerous advocacy interests. In 2017, she co-founded a nonprofit for chronically ill students of online institutions (The Sabrina Constellation), and in 2020, she started Working PhDs, a group dedicated to designing resources to help humanities PhDs pursue non-academic careers with the support of fellowships and grants from the Central New York Humanities Corridor, Humanities Center of New York, and Eastman’s Institute for Music Leadership.