Kira Thurman is an American historian and musicologist.^[1] She was a 2017 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow.^[2]

She is a classically trained pianist who grew up in Vienna.^[3] She graduated from University of Rochester and Eastman School of Music. She is a professor at University of Michigan.^[4]

Her article, "Performing Lieder, Hearing Race: Debating Blackness, Whiteness, and German National Identity in Interwar Central Europe" won the Central European Historical Society's Annelise Thimme prize for best article published in 2019/2020.^[5][3]

Singing like Germans has thus far won seven prizes: the Marfield Prize (National Award for Arts Writing), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Gleason Book Award, the German Studies Association's DAAD prize for best book in History/Social Sciences,^[6] the Royal Musical Association's Best Monograph Prize,^[7] the American Historical Association's George Mosse Prize,^[8] the American Musicological Society's Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award,^[9] and the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures (honorable mention).^[10] NPR named it one of the Best Books of 2021.^[11][3]

Works

• Singing Like Germans : Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms Cornell University Press, 2021. ISBN 9781501759840 ^{[12][13][14][15]}
• Thurman, Kira (2021-08-27). "When Europe Offered Black Composers an Ear". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-06-03.