Adrian Gronseth is an MA student in the History Department at UI. He earned his BA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has pursued his twin passions for music and history as a songwriter, performer, researcher, and teacher. In 2017, Adrian won the Grand Prize for American Songwriter Magazine’s Lyric Contest. In 2021, he was selected as an Artist-in-Residence at Stones River National Battlefield, where he composed No Place Like Home, a song cycle about the history of the battlefield. Adrian was a member of the interdisciplinary BlueGAP Project in the summer of 2024, composing a sound collage that chronicles the history of water pollution and agriculture in Iowa. His current research interests include the early American music industry, African American music during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and folk song collecting around the turn of the 20th century.