Biography

Name, Title, & Role(s)
Full Name:
Ellie M. Hisama
Position/Title:
Professor
Position/Title:
Vice Chair
Contact Information
Office Address:
609 Dodge
Office Hours:
TBA
Columbia e-mail:
eh2252@columbia.edu
Telephone Number(s):
(212) 854-1253
Fax:
(212) 854-8191
Mailing Address:
Prof. Ellie M. Hisama Department of Music Columbia University 2960 Broadway Dodge 609, MC 1823 New York, NY 10027

Ellie Hisama 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 was also on the faculty of the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is Professor of Music and Vice Chair of the Department, and 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, Journal of Musicology, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 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.  Most recently, she is the recipient of a Tsunoda Senior Fellowship at Waseda University in Tokyo for residency in 2010. She has served as an evaluator for the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, and the American Musicological Society. She is an Associate Editor of Perspectives of New Music and is Founding Editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music published by Cambridge University Press, http://journals.cambridge.org/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 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 is on the advisory boards of Tracking Pop, a new 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 boards of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture; the Journal of Musicology; and Echo: a music-centered journal. She is a member of the AMS's Publications Committee and of the Advisory Board of the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music. She has co-organized 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 is a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia. In 2008-9, she was Visiting Professor of Music at Harvard University.  In summer 2009, she was an invited participant at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in the seminar Postcolonial Music Studies.

Degrees, Publications, and Recordings
Degrees:
AB (Chicago 1987), BM (Queens 1989)
MA (CUNY 1992)
PhD (CUNY 1996)
Selected Publications:


Books and Journals 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: "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)


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