about

Koppes’s academic research traces the afterlives of vaudeville blues throughout twentieth-century America, examining how racial capitalism and cultural memory shape the conditions through which women’s blues have been recorded, circulated, celebrated, and constrained. Her work follows these histories from the early race records industry into the blues revival in psychedelic rock, and into later feminist interventions that challenge the exclusions and distortions within blues discourse. Across her scholarship, she brings together feminist musicology, archival methodologies, and cultural theory to foreground the labor, craft, and legacy of artists too often sidelined in American popular music studies.

Annie currently serves as the editorial assistant for Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, where she supports the publication of innovative research at the intersection of sound, gender, and power. She is also a freelance music journalist, writing artist-centered criticism and regularly pitching to independent and alternative outlets, with a particular investment in local live performance scenes.

Her collaborative work includes contributions to the “Archives and Creative Process: Blues Women and Rosetta Records” project—in collaboration with folk musician Tift Merritt and anthropologist Margaret Lou Brown—sponsored by Bass Connections and the Franklin Humanities Institute, which bridges scholarly research with creative production and archival access. She was also a 2026 Berger-Carter-Berger fellow at the Institute for Jazz Studies.

Beyond her academic work, Annie is an active songwriter and performer, whose music reflects a deep investment in the art of storytelling, embodiment, and acoustics as a site of connection.

For writing, publications, and ongoing scholarly inquiries, see writing. For original music and multimedia work, see anneek.