Nathan Fleshner’s research focuses on the portrayal of mental illness, trauma, and the therapeutic process in music. He is interested in songs used as medical narratives to describe artists’ psychological and therapeutic experiences and has published and presented on songs by Adele, Tori Amos, Eminem, Linkin Park, Dave Matthews Band, Maren Morris, Prince Paul, Malvina Reynolds, Robert Schumann, Townes Van Zandt, and Kanye West. He is also interested in conscious and unconscious thought processes: in particular, the therapeutic, music analytic, and creative processes and how they interact. An avid Seinfeld fan, he has written two book chapters on music in the show.

He has presented papers at national and international music analysis and other disciplinary conferences, including the Society for Music Theory, the Society for Music Analysis, the International Association for Analytical Psychology in Zurich, Switzerland, the Eighth European Music Analysis Conference in Leuven, Belgium, the Ninth European Music Analysis Conference in Strasbourg, France, the Second International Conference on Music and Consciousness in Oxford, England, and Tracking the Creative Process in Music in Lisbon, Portugal. His research has been published in multiple journals and the edited volumes, Music Video Games: Performance, Politics, and Play, The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Music, and For the Sake of the Song: Essays on Townes Van Zandt.

He authors the column, “Do You Hear That Too? Music and the Medical Humanities” for the website, The Polyphony, associated with the Institute for the Medical Humanities at Durham University, UK. The column explores musicians and their music through the lens of mental health and the broader field of medicine, including analyses of specific works and connections between fields of music and medicine.