Ellie Hisama | |
---|---|
Title | Dean, faculty of music, professor of music |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Queens College, City University of New York |
Thesis | Gender, Politics, and Modernist Music: Analyses of Five Compositions by Ruth Crawford (1901-1953) and Marion Bauer (1887-1955) (1996) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Music theorist |
Sub-discipline | Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Music |
Institutions | CUNY - Brooklyn Columbia University University of Toronto |
Ellie Hisama is a Japanese-American[1] music theorist who is dean of the faculty of music and a professor of music at the University of Toronto. Hisama's work focuses on issues of gender, race, sexuality, and the sociology of music.[2]
Hisama attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy[2]. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Chicago in 1987[2], and her Bachelor of Music degree in violin from Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) in 1989.[3] In 1996, she completed her Ph.D. in music theory from CUNY with the dissertation topic, Gender, Politics, and Modernist Music: Analyses of Five Compositions by Ruth Crawford (1901-1953) and Marion Bauer (1887-1955). This dissertation won CUNY's Barry S. Brook Dissertation Award for outstanding dissertation of the year at CUNY.[4]
Hisama was an associate professor of music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York from 1997 to 2005, in which capacity she also served as the third director of the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music.[5] In 2006, she joined the faculty of Columbia University as a professor in the theory and historical musicology areas.[6] While at Columbia, Hisama served as director of graduate studies for the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Hisama was also the founding director of the workshop, "For the Daughters of Harlem: Working in Sound," a program to provide public school students an opportunity create sound projects on the Columbia campus. In 2020, she was an inaugural recipient of the Faculty Mentoring Award, which "recognizes senior faculty's work mentoring tenure-track and mid-career faculty." Hisama was named a professor emerita upon her departure from Columbia in 2021.[2]
In 2021, Hisama was named dean of the faculty of music at the University of Toronto for a five year term.[7] Her stated goals for the position included "leadership from the administrative side [on] diversity, equity, and inclusion."[8]
Hisama's research focuses on issues of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and the role of music in culture. Her doctoral dissertation focused on analysis from a feminist perspective of the music of two female American composers from the turn of the twentieth century, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Marion Bauer. More generally, her research includes close readings which attempt to situate analysis of music within the context of the composers' gender, politics, and social views.[1].
In addition to scholarship on feminist topics, Hisama coedited a volume on Hip Hop studies, Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies', with Evan Rapport.[9] She has written extensively on issues of diversity and inclusion within the profession of music theory.[10]