J. Mackenzie Pierce is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and author of Sounds of Survival: Polish Music and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2025). This project recovers the central role played by acculturated Polish Jews within Poland's classical music scene and examines the musical responses to suffering among this community. He also writes and teaches about topics such as trauma and memory studies, the history of music technology, musical nationalism, music and capitalism, and the music of Frederyk Chopin.
Committed to archival and interdisciplinary research, Pierce has been supported through fellowships from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, the Kościuszko Foundation, and the Beinecke Foundation. In the United States, he regularly presents new findings for audiences at annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Abroad, he has been invited to speak by major Polish cultural and academic institutions, including the Union of Polish Composers, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Jewish Historical Institute, and the Chopin International Piano Competition.