Dr. Cana F. McGhee
Biography
Dr. Cana (KAY-nuh) McGhee is a musicologist, writer, and environmental humanities scholar. At Claflin, she teaches the music history sequence for all Music Majors, music appreciation, the history of Black music, and introduction to world music. Her scholarship explores how music-making and sonic practice help make sense of multispecies relationships and experiences with the environment. In particular, she is interested in exploring the role that music plays in navigating experiences of ongoing global climate crises.
She is currently working on her first book project, provisionally titled Making Plants Musical: Intimacy, Environments, and the Promise of Botanical Musicality. In it, she examines the figuration of musical plants in the modern environmental movement since the 19th-century, highlighting both scientific inquiries around plants’ seemingly musical abilities in addition to the ways that music personifies the unknown inner worlds of plant life. This book emerges from her dissertation research on “botanical musicalities,” a term that she coined to refer to musically mediated encounters among Humans and plants across genres as varied as 19th-century French art song, popular music concept albums, and online communities of plant caretakers.
Prior to joining Claflin, Dr. McGhee completed her doctoral work at Harvard University. While at Harvard, she attained the Teaching Certificate from the Derek S. Bok Center for Teaching and Learning after participating in numerous workshops on topics like discussion-leading, responsible grading protocols, and innovative feedback mechanisms for both pedagogues and students. She has presented at numerous academic societies and symposia, including the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, among others. Her scholarship has been published in the form of a narrative nonfiction review for Musicology Now; an article in a special issue of Open Cultural Studies that thematized the plant humanities; and will appear in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Music and the Environment. She is also working on a co-written article on Black experimentalisms in urban gardens, considering how improvisation and embodiment reimagine the “plant” in the legacies of plantation economies, their sedimenting of Black racial identity, and how both forces shape life amid the Anthropocene.
Dr. McGhee looks forward to bringing her passion for community-engaged work into her role at Claflin. She currently co-chairs the Ecomusicology Study Group of the American Musicological Society, and has previously held several leadership positions such as with Harvard Graduate Music Forum, the Harvard Graduate Students Union, and on the editorial committee for Musicology Now. Dr. McGhee is excited to use the experiences in potentially developing outdoor performance experiences for and with the Orangeburg community, in addition to exploring other opportunities at the intersection of environmentalism and arts activism in the beautiful, historic landscape of the area. Outside of her life at Claflin, Dr. McGhee maintains an active life as a choral alto. For more information, please also see Dr. McGhee’s website.
Education
Doctor of Philosophy in Historical Musicology (Secondary in History of Science), Harvard University 2026
Bachelor of Arts in Music and French Studies, Emory University 2019