Katherine M. Leo (Ph.D., Musicology, The Ohio State University; J.D., The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law) joined the Millikin faculty in 2017 to teach a variety of traditional, hybrid, online, and travel courses in western music history, ethnomusicology, research methods, and legal studies in the School of Music (SOM). As chair of academic music core studies, Dr. Leo has collaborated with SOM faculty to revolutionize musicology and music theory curricula and to design innovative micro-credentials that best prepare students for personal, professional, and artistic success. Dr. Leo is a research advisor for the James Millikin Scholar (JMS) honors program, and in 2021 she was named JMS Educator of the Year. As an active member of the Millikin-Decatur Symphony Orchestra (MDSO), Dr. Leo serves as program notes annotator, speaker, and cellist.
Millikin honored Dr. Leo’s cross-disciplinary research in 2026 with the John C. Griswold Distinguished Professorship; and in 2025 with the Research and Artistic Achievement Award. Her principal scholarship investigates the history, methods, and ethics of forensic musicology. Her 2021 monograph on the history of musical expert testimony, Forensic Musicology and the Blurred Lines of Federal Copyright History (Bloomsbury | Amazon), was praised for being “meticulously researched, and sparely and clearly written.” Dr. Leo is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Forensic Musicology (forthcoming).
As a music industry historian specializing in early-twentieth century US commercial styles, Dr. Leo has published on Duke Ellington, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and Paul Whiteman. Dr. Leo’s work has been featured in several edited collections, notably including Grove Music Online (OUP), Musical Borrowing and Copyright Law: A Genre-By-Genre Analysis (Bloomsbury-Hart), and the Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory (OUP); and she has published articles in several premier peer-reviewed journals, notably including The Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicological Research, Open Access Musicology, Jazz Perspectives, Blue Light, Music and Politics, and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy. She also contributes to the Music Copyright Infringement Resource (MCIR) blog.
Dr. Leo is an active member of the American Musicological Society (AMS), with whom she collaborates on public-facing programming; and she has notably served as Secretary of the American Musicological Society-Midwest Chapter. She is a frequent guest speaker at university music and law schools nationwide; and at annual national meetings of the AMS, the College Music Society, the Copyright Society (CMS), the Society for American Music (SAM), and the Society for Music Theory (SMT), as well as international conferences on jazz and public musicology hosted across England, the European Union, and North America. Since 2019, Dr. Leo has participated in music copyright matters as amicus curia, consulting analyst, and as a freelance musical expert witness.