GIMC Project Directors

Greg Barz

Greg Barz, Grammy nominated producer and CEO of Lime Pulp Records, is an associate professor of ethnomusicology in the Blair School of Music, with appointments in Anthropology and the Divinity school. This year he released a recording with Smithsonian Folkways that draws on his field recordings in East Africa of the music of HIV+ women’s groups. His research in Uganda was supported by a senior research fellowship with in Fulbright African AIDS Research Program. Barz’s most recent research involves documenting the role of music on the radio broadcasts that led to the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s. His proudest accomplishment, however, is serving as director of Vanderbilt’s “Kampala Project,” a program sponsored by The Commons that takes students to East Africa each summer to engage intense service-learning initiatives in local health care settings.

Allison Pingree

Allison Pingree is co-director of the Music, Religion and the South project (the sponsor of God in Music City), and has affiliated faculty appointments at Vanderbilt in the Blair School of Music, Medical Education, and American Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies.  She received her Ph.D. in English from Harvard (specializing in late 19th and early 20th century American literature and culture), and taught there in the departments of English, History and Literature, and Expository Writing, and in the department of English at Brandeis University. Since 1998 she has directed the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching [www.vanderbilt.edu/cft]

Her research interests include spirituality in higher education; gender and pedagogy; interdisciplinary teaching, learning and collaboration; and leadership and organizational change.  Her passion as an educator lies in exploring ways to integrate body, heart, mind and spirit to promote deep learning. She has sung with the Vanderbilt Community Chorus [http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/vcc/default.htm] at the Blair School of Music since 2002.

John McClure

Professor McClure's teaching is in the area of homiletics. His special interests are in the relationships between philosophy, theology, ethics and preaching. His publications include The Four Codes of Preaching: Rhetorical Strategies (Fortress, 1991), The Roundtable Pulpit: Where Preaching and Leadership Meet (Abingdon, 1995), Telling the Truth: Preaching About Sexual and Domestic Violence (co-edited with Nancy Ramsay, United Church Press, 1998), and Other-wise Preaching: A Postmodern Ethic for Homiletics (Chalice, 2001).