Hisama, Ellie M.

About Me

Position/Title:

Professor

Vice Chair

Theory Area Head

Ellie Hisama came to Columbia in 2006, having previously taught at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where she was Director of the Institute for Studies in American Music; she was also on the faculty of the Graduate Center, CUNY. Author of Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (2001) and co-editor of Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies (2005) and Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music (2007), she specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, post-tonal theory, American music, popular music, gender and feminist studies, critical studies of music and race, and the social and political roles of music. She has received major fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation/Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, and has served as an evaluator for the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, and the American Musicological Society. She has co-organized several major conferences, including Ruth Crawford Seeger: Modernity, Tradition, and the Making of American Music (2001), Local Music/Global Connections: New York City at the Millennium (2001), and Feminist Theory and Music 8 (2005). She is Founding Editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music published by Cambridge University Press, http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=SAM, and serves as an Associate Editor of Perspectives of New Music. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music. She is also on the editorial or advisory boards of Journal of Musicology, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Echo: a music-centered journal, and is a member of the Publications Committee of the American Musicological Society. She has served on the Society for Music Theory's Committee on the Status of Women and its Diversity Committee. She is Professor of Music and Vice Chair of the Department, Theory Area Head, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.

Academic Background

Degrees:

AB (Chicago 1987), BM (Queens 1989)

MA (CUNY 1992)

PhD (CUNY 1996)

Selected Publications:

Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music, ed. Ray Allen and Ellie M. Hisama (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007)

Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies, ISAM monograph no. 35, ed. Ellie M. Hisama and Evan Rapport (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 2005)

Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; paperback edition, 2005)

"In Pursuit of a Proletarian Music: Ruth Crawford's 'Sacco, Vanzetti'," Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music, ed. Ray Allen and Ellie M. Hisama (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2007)

"'We're All Asian Really': Hip Hop's Afro-Asian Crossings," Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies, ISAM monograph no. 35, ed. Ellie M. Hisama and Evan Rapport (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 2005)

"John Zorn and the Postmodern Condition," Locating East Asia in Western Art Music (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004)

Afro-Asian Crosscurrents in Contemporary Hip Hop, Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter XXXII/1 (Fall 2002)

"Review of Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology, ed. Bell Yung and Helen Rees (University of Illinois Press, 1999)," Music Theory Spectrum 24/1 (Spring 2002)

"Feminist Music Theory Into the Millennium: A Personal History," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 25/4 (Summer 2000). Reprinted in Feminisms at a Millennium, ed. Judith A. Howard and Carolyn Allen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)

"From L'Étranger to 'Killing an Arab': Representing the Other in a Cure Song," Expression in Pop-Rock Music: A Collection of Critical and Analytical Essays (New York: Garland Press, 2000). To be reprinted in a revised and expanded paperback edition, 2007

Life Outside the Canon? A Walk on the Wild Side, Music Theory Online 6.3 (2000)

"Voice, Race, and Sexuality in the Music of Joan Armatrading," Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music (Zürich: Carciofoli Verlagshaus, 1999)

(Re)discovering Miriam Gideon, Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter XXVII/2 (Spring 1998)

"The Question of Climax in Ruth Crawford's String Quartet, Mvt. 3," Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1995)

"Review of Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. Ruth A. Solie (University of California Press, 1993) and Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge University Press, 1993)," Journal of Musicology XII, no. 2 (Spring 1994)

"Postcolonialism on the Make: The Music of John Mellencamp, David Bowie, and John Zorn," Popular Music 12/2 (May 1993). Reprinted in Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music, ed. Richard Middleton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Contact Information

Office:

609 Dodge