About Me

I am a musicologist and permanent Lecturer in the Music Department and Chair of the Thomas Hunter Honors Program at Hunter College of CUNY, where I teach core major courses and those of my own design such as Reframing Opera: Gender, Race, Class; Musical Quotation and Allusion; and Women and Power in Mozart’s Operas. On the latter, my ASECS presentation, “Fallacies of Context and Change,” was described as “a brilliant critique of contemporary engagement with Mozart’s women” in the conference review for Eighteenth-Century Music (March 2020).

In my research and teaching I focus on a nuanced approach to thorny issues of complicity, race, and gender in canonic operas to show how a fuller view of the context, then and now, can help us to confront more directly and productively the troubling issues raised in their stories.  I am currently working on two book projects about dramatic music and its relevance—one forthcoming in 2025, Teaching Opera and Musical Theater With Intention, co-author Elizabeth Wells for the musical theater repertoire, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, and the other focusing on performance and scholarship, with emphasis on recent interactions among scholars and practitioners that point to exciting paths forward.

Growing from this work is my invited chapter, “The Dialogue as Indispensable,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mozart’s The Magic Flute, edited by Jessica Waldoff, 2023. I have also been invited to join the Board of the Mozart Society of America and the pre-concert lecturers for Lincoln Center’s Great Performers Series.