2024 Distinguished Guest Speaker
Ayana O. Smith (Indiana University)
Ayana O. Smith is Associate Professor in Musicology in 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. Professor 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. Professor Smith’s interest in these topics originate in her backgrounds in performance (voice, early music), literary studies (Latin, Italian, French), and her personal identity (African American, with close family in Italy).
Professor Smith has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In spring of 2022, she was a residential fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. She serves on the board of directors for the American Handel Society, the editorial board of the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment and recently completed her role as the Vice President for the Society of Seventeenth Century Music—a role which enabled her to implement several new programs focused on diversity in the Society and in the field.
Musicking Planning Committee
Holly Roberts, Associate Director of Programming
Lori Kruckenberg, Professor of Musicology
Eric Mentzel, Professor of Voice
Craig Phillips, Associate Professor of Voice and Vocal Pedagogy
Joyce Chen, Assistant Professor of Historical Keyboards
Naomi Castro, Patron and Community Engagement Coordinator
Laura Trujillo, PhD Candidate Musicology
Frances Pinkham, Oregon Bach Festival Programming Assistant
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