Nathan Fleshner

Nathan Fleshner is Associate Professor of Music Theory and Associate Dean of Research and Facilities at the Natalie L. Haslam College of Music at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research focuses on popular music and the portrayal of mental illness, trauma, and the therapeutic process in music. He is interested in songs used as medical narratives to describe artists’ psychological and therapeutic experiences and has published and presented on songs by Adele, Tori Amos, Julien Baker, boygenius, Eminem, Linkin Park, Dave Matthews Band, Maren Morris, Prince Paul, Malvina Reynolds, Robert Schumann, Townes van Zandt, and Kanye West. He is also interested in conscious and unconscious thought processes: in particular, the therapeutic, music analytic, and creative processes and how they interact. An avid Seinfeld fan, he has written two book chapters on music from the show.

He has presented papers at national and international music analysis and other disciplinary conferences, including the Society for Music Theory, the Society for Music Analysis, the International Association for Analytical Psychology in Zurich, Switzerland, the Eighth European Music Analysis Conference in Leuven, Belgium, the Ninth European Music Analysis Conference in Strasbourg, France, the Second International Conference on Music and Consciousness in Oxford, England, and Tracking the Creative Process in Music in Lisbon, Portugal. His research has been published in multiple journals and the edited volumes, Music Video Games: Performance, Politics, and Play (Bloomsbury), The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music (Oxford University Press), For the Sake of the Song: Essays on Townes Van Zandt (University of North Texas Press), and The Palgrave Handbook of Scoring Peak TV: Music and Sound in Television’s New ‘Golden Age’ (Palgrave MacMillan).