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Creating Other Spaces at a Moment of Peril: Music Studies as Critical Practice (AMS President's Endowed Plenary Lecture)

14 Nov 2026
6:00 p.m.–7:30p.m. ET

Creating Other Spaces at a Moment of Peril: Music Studies as Critical Practice (AMS President's Endowed Plenary Lecture)

Chair: Julie Cumming (McGill University)

Presenter: Ellie M. Hisama (University of Toronto)

A question posed by the historian Howard Zinn in 1970–“what kinds of work can scholars do, in deliberate unneutral pursuit of a more livable world?”–yields a fraught set of responses in the year of the U.S.’s semiquincentennial. Sharp conflicts about how history should be presented and taught are leading many to wonder about the futurities of music studies, the humanities, higher education, and intellectual life generally. In this lecture, Hisama argues for the utility of creating other spaces that enable scholars of music to pursue a more livable world during perilous times.

Author

  • Ellie Hisama

    Ellie M. Hisama is Distinguished Professor of Music, Society, and Culture and past Dean at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music, holding a cross-appointment with the Women & Gender Studies Institute. She is past Director of the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College and Professor Emerita at Columbia University where she was an inaugural recipient of the Provost’s Faculty Mentoring Award. She received the Tsunoda Senior Fellowship at Waseda University, a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and was named the Edward T. Cone Member in Music Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of Gendering Musical Modernism and co-editor of Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds and Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip-Hop Studies. She is an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society.