In this talk, Dr. Ayana Smith (Indiana University, Bloomington) will provide an overview of her recent monograph, Inclusive Music Histories: Leading Change through Research and Pedagogy (Routledge 2023). Published to wide acclaim, the book describes four frameworks that she created to teach and write about questions of representation of identity in music. Dr. Smith will outline these frameworks in her talk and discuss how she has used them in her own classrooms. She will conclude by reading passages from her book, at which point we welcome further discussion.
Ayana O. Smith is an Associate Professor in Musicology at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. Her work centers on interdisciplinary and intertextual approaches to the distinct repertories of seventeenth-century Italian opera and African-American music. Prof. Smith is the author of the 2023 book Inclusive Music Histories: Leading Change through Research and Pedagogy (Routledge) and the 2019 book Dreaming with Open Eyes: Opera, Aesthetics, and Perception in Arcadian Rome (University of California Press). Her work offers theoretical models for scholarship in music history, with broad implications for performance and other humanities disciplines. Her most recent publications complement each other to tell long histories of race, representation, and identity in Europe and the United States. Prof. Smith’s interest in these topics originate in her background in performance (voice, early music), literary studies (Latin, Italian, French), and her personal identity (African American, with close family in Italy).
The lecture will be on Friday, Oct. 13, from 12:45 p.m. to 2 p.m. The lecture is free and accessible to the entire University of Hartford Community. It will be held virtually on Teams. Please contact Dr. Karen Cook (kacook@hartford.edu) to register and receive the meeting link.