Hisama, Ellie M.
Ellie M. Hisama, Professor of Music, came to Columbia in 2006, having previously taught at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where she was Director of the Institute for Studies in American Music. She has also taught at Harvard University, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Connecticut College, Ohio State University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Queens College/CUNY, and the University of Virginia. She is a member of the Theory and Historical Musicology areas.
Author of Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (2001) and co-editor of Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies (2005) and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music (2007), she specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, post-tonal theory, American music, popular music, gender and feminist studies, critical studies of music and race, and the social and political roles of music. Her work has been published in the journals Popular Music, Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, AVANT, Journal of Musicology, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and American Music Review; and in the edited volumes Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945; Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music; Locating East Asia in Western Art Music; Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies; and Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds. She has received major fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation/Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and was an Associate at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke College.
She has served as an evaluator for fellowships offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, and the American Musicological Society. She is Founding Editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music, published by Cambridge University Press (JSAM). Two articles she edited for JSAM have won major awards: Christopher Reynolds's article "Porgy and Bess: 'An American Wozzeck'," published in JSAM 1/1 (February 2007), won two awards--the American Musicological Society's H. Colin Slim Award in 2008 for "a musicological article of exceptional merit" by a senior scholar and the 2009 Kurt Weill Prize for "outstanding scholarship on music theater since 1900"--and Laurie Stras's article "White Face, Black Voice: Race, Gender, and Region in the Music of the Boswell Sisters," published in JSAM 1/2 (May 2007) won an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award in the Pop Articles category in 2008.
She has served on the Society for Music Theory's Program Committee, Committee on the Status of Women, and Diversity Committee and on the AMS's Program Committee and Publications Committee. She is an Associate Editor of Perspectives of New Music. She is on the advisory boards of Tracking Pop, a popular music book series published by the University of Michigan Press, and of the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and is also on the editorial board of Echo: a music-centered journal. She is a member of the SMT's Publication Awards Committee and of the Advisory Board of the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music. She has co-directed several major conferences, including Ruth Crawford Seeger: Modernity, Tradition, and the Making of American Music (2001), Local Music/Global Connections: New York City at the Millennium (2001), and Feminist Theory and Music 8 (2005). She has presented papers at meetings of the Society for Music Theory, American Musicological Society, Society for Ethnomusicology, Society for American Music, Feminist Theory and Music, International Society for the Study of Popular Music, Modernist Studies Association, and National Women's Studies Association. She has given invited talks at a number of institutions, including the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, Duke University, the Eastman School of Music, the University of Michigan, Waseda University, Tokyo Geijutso Daigaku [Tokyo University of the Arts], the University of Washington, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, and the CUNY Graduate Center.
She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia and taught at Harvard University as a Visiting Professor of Music. She was an invited participant at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in the seminar Postcolonial Music Studies and was in residence at Waseda University as a Tsunoda Senior Fellow. She became Editor in Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture in 2013.
Undergraduate Courses Taught:
Humanities W1123: Music Humanities
Music V3321: Chromatic Harmony and Counterpoint I
Music V3322: Chromatic Harmony and Counterpoint II
Music V3310: Techniques of Twentieth-Century Music
Music V3395: Listening to Hip Hop
Music V3385: Analysis of Popular Music
Music V3030: Asian American Music
Graduate Courses Taught:
Music G6333: Proseminar in Music Theory
Music G6385: Analysis of Popular Music
Music G8360: Gender/Sexuality/Music
Music G8370: Ruth Crawford Seeger
Music G8111: Seminar in Historical Musicology: 20th Century [New Currents in American Music Studies]
Books and Journals
Editor, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture (2013 - ).
Founding Editor, Journal of the Society for American Music, vol. 1, nos. 1-4 (2007); vol. 2, nos. 1-4 (2008). http://journals.cambridge.org/jsam
Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music, ed. Ray Allen and Ellie M. Hisama (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007)
Editor, American Music, vol. 24, nos. 2-4 (Summer, Fall, Winter 2006)
Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies, ISAM monograph no. 35, ed. Ellie M. Hisama and Evan Rapport (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 2005)
Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; paperback edition, 2005)
Articles, Book Chapters, and Other Publications:
"The Ruth Crawford Seeger Sessions." To be published in Daedalus, special issue edited by Gerald Early on American music (forthcoming 2013).
"Comment on AVANT's interview with John Zorn." AVANT: The Journal of the Philosophical-Interdisciplinary Avant-Garde T/2012. Translated into Polish.
“Feminist Scholarship as a Social Act: Remembering Adrienne Fried Block,” American Music Review XXXIX/1 (Fall 2009).
"In Pursuit of a Proletarian Music: Ruth Crawford's 'Sacco, Vanzetti'," Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music, ed. Ray Allen and Ellie M. Hisama (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007)
"From L'Étranger to 'Killing an Arab': Representing the Other in a Cure Song," Expression in Pop-Rock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays (New York: Garland Press, 2000). Reprinted in a revised and expanded paperback edition (New York: Routledge, 2007)
"'We're All Asian Really': Hip Hop's Afro-Asian Crossings," Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies, ISAM monograph no. 35, ed. Ellie M. Hisama and Evan Rapport (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 2005)
"John Zorn and the Postmodern Condition," Locating East Asia in Western Art Music (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004)
"Afro-Asian Crosscurrents in Contemporary Hip Hop," Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter XXXII/1 (Fall 2002)
Review of Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology, ed. Bell Yung and Helen Rees, Music Theory Spectrum 24/1 (Spring 2002)
"Feminist Music Theory Into the Millennium: A Personal History," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25/4 (Summer 2000). Reprinted in Feminisms at a Millennium, ed. Judith A. Howard and Carolyn Allen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)
"Postcolonialism on the Make: The Music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie, and John Zorn," Popular Music 12/2 (May 1993). Reprinted in Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, ed. Richard Middleton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
"Life Outside the Canon? A Walk on the Wild Side," Music Theory Online 6.3 (2000)
"Voice, Race, and Sexuality in the Music of Joan Armatrading," Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music (Zürich: Carciofoli Verlagshaus, 1999)
"(Re)discovering Miriam Gideon," Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter XXVII/2 (Spring 1998)
"The Question of Climax in Ruth Crawford's String Quartet, Mvt. 3," Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1995)
Review of Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie, and Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, Journal of Musicology XII, no. 2 (Spring 1994)
