Alison Maggart is a musicologist, whose research focuses on twentieth-century music and culture, in particular serial music and aesthetics, philosophies of dissonance and noise, esotericism in music, and U.S. modernist identity. Her dissertation, "Referential Play in 'Serious' Music: Allusions to the Past in Milton Babbitt's Works from the Late 1980s," theorized the role that borrowing and quotation play in Babbitt's aesthetics and construction of American-Jewish identity. She has also presented at numerous conferences on postwar nostalgia; intertextuality in serial music; opera in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign; and time travel in "sound baths" at the Integraton. In recent years, Maggart has become increasingly interested in the use of sound in contemporary meditation and popular philosophies of vibration.