Graduate Student Profile: Matthew Kogan
Matthew Kogan is a 4th year PhD student in Linguistics. As a 2024 THI Summer Public Fellow, Kogan worked with Indexical, a nonprofit organization dedicated to experimentation in music. We talked to Kogan about his summer fellowship and the many benefits of this experience.
Hi Matthew! Thanks for chatting with us about your THI Public Fellowship this summer. To begin with, how did you decide to work with Indexical, and what were you doing?
This summer, I worked as a Programs Assistant with Indexical, a non-profit dedicated to radical and experimental music, centering historically, culturally, and institutionally underrepresented artists. The bulk of my fellowship was aimed at assisting the small team who run Indexical with the transition into the 2024 – 2025 performance season, which began in mid-September. I spent some time learning more about event production and marketing, which is an ongoing challenge for small arts organizations. I found it rewarding to help out with these efforts and see the immediate impact when people shared that our newsletters and social media campaigns got them and their friends excited about our workshops and performances over the summer.
Was your position connected to your research at UC Santa Cruz or something different? What were some of the ways you brought your expertise as a Humanities PhD student to Indexical?
In my academic work, I’m primarily interested in understanding language comprehension and the kinds of representations we leverage when processing language. More broadly, I study the relationships between language and cognition. Though this work is not exactly consistent with Indexical’s mission, I was eager to work in this space particularly to further explore expression and perception through Indexical’s approach to experimentation in music and sound. I was thrilled to engage with artists who are similarly driven by investigations into our relationships with complex systems of expression and communication.
More concretely, my experience as a scholar in the Humanities has afforded me with a number of organizational and technical skills that I feel allowed me to support Indexical’s wide-ranging efforts this summer. I was able to provide another (hopefully useful) perspective on project management and public-facing writing and adopt my growing background in equity-minded pedagogy in a unique setting to contribute to Indexical’s efforts of serving underrepresented artists and communities in Santa Cruz.
What were some of the skills you learned and were able to apply throughout the fellowship?
Early in the fellowship, I quickly grasped the interdisciplinary nature of working in a small arts non-profit. It was a bit challenging to navigate the early stages of learning how to draft and organize a wide-reaching newsletter while also having to communicate with artists regarding their artist statements and performance information while also cleaning and preparing the event space ahead of an evening performance. It was all quite exciting and new, but there were definitely some fast-paced moments that seemed daunting, given their immediacy and the pressure of putting on a show for an eager audience.
I also found it exciting to develop a new kind of public-facing writing style for marketing, which is very distinct from my genre of academic writing in Linguistics. In creating our newsletters, we were constantly negotiating the stylistic and contentful differences in the ways artists describe their work in order to create a cohesive description both faithful to the artists and Indexical as an arts space. It became easy to get carried away when trying to write copy that was simultaneously descriptive, expressive, and captivating. I guess this isn’t anything necessarily unfamiliar when I think about my academic writing, but something about this particular style of writing had some curious hurdles to overcome.
Based on your experience, what were some of the meaningful moments from your public-facing work?
As part of Indexical’s broader goals for the summer, I designed a small calendar/program booklet for the Fall performance line-up (which you might see around campus or around town in a number of places). I was really excited to be able to work on a project like this, particularly as it allowed me to further develop my personal interests in graphic design.
Michael Flora, Indexical’s Executive Director, and I spent many hours workshopping aesthetic ideas and possible layouts for the booklet. I came to appreciate the unique challenges of designing an object that was necessarily functional in relaying the details of the performances but was also intended to represent the radical artistic ethos of Indexical. All in all, I found it incredibly fun to be able to pursue this kind of creative project, and I’m quite delighted with its recent reception.
What are some of the things you learned that you plan to take with you into your career?
In transitioning back to my role as a researcher, I’m hoping I can incorporate the playful and exploratory practices of Indexical’s artists in pursuing our intertwined questions of perception and expression. More and more, I’ve been coming to understand the creative nature of academic research, and this is in many ways informed by the kinds of people I’ve worked with at Indexical, who similarly weave scientific rigor with wonder and curiosity.
I’m grateful to have worked in such a supportive community of artists and creatives, all of whom recognize the exciting challenges of organizing a small space dedicated to radical art. Similar to projects and students supported by the THI, Indexical is only able to put on performances and provide a platform for artists because of its incredibly supportive network of patrons, artists, and community members. It’s amazing to be able to find such a community outside of the University, and I’m particularly appreciative of the support I’ve received from this community for the small role I played in facilitating Indexical’s smooth operations this summer.
We’d love for you to share more about your research, especially as you are back on campus for Fall Quarter. What are you currently working on, and what are your plans for the academic year ahead?
Gosh, what a big question. I’m currently working on my qualifying exam, where I’m investigating the granularity of the representations we encode and deploy when processing sentences in real time, and the ways in which we reference and retrieve those representations in working memory when resolving dependencies between linguistic items. This fall, I’m teaching the Linguistic department’s Pedagogy of Linguistics course with our first and second-year grads, and I’m also taking an introductory rowing class!