2025–26 AMS Fellows Announced

Proposed Dissertation Title: Identity, Agency, and Performance Aesthetics: A Study of Opera and the Operatic Voice in Lagos, Nigeria (2000 – 2023).

This dissertation deploys an impressive array of theoretical frameworks and methodologies in order to build a nuanced account of opera production and performance in Nigeria. Drawing on their own experiences performing with the Musical Society of Nigeria (MUSON), interviews and surveys, and archival research, the author develops a multifaceted accounting of the politics of operatic performance and performativity on Lagos stages. The committee appreciated in particular the use of frameworks such as Achille Mbembe’s idea of Afropolitanism both to ground the study in local modes of knowledge production and to critique concepts of racial identity, Blackness, and whiteness that, in being rooted in U.S. theoretical and historical discourses, are not necessarily adequate to explain the complexity of staging opera in Nigeria.

Proposed Dissertation Title: Unmoored: Musical Labor and Affect in the Global Cruise Industry

This dissertation makes an important intervention in global musicology by considering how musical labor and cruise tourism help construct a “soundtrack of leisure” that perpetuates not only the hegemony of Western popular music but also the postcolonial dynamics of global capitalism. The author’s writing is highly engaging and theoretically grounded, showing a virtuosic command of both scholarly frameworks and their ethnographic research as they develop their concept of “oceanic postcoloniality,” a concept mediated and motivated—in their telling—by music. The committee was impressed by this striking combination of theoretical rigor with a command of many different contexts and research sites, and by the author’s ability to communicate their ideas in memorable, evocative prose.

Proposed Dissertation Title: More Than Meets the Ear: Embodied Memory, Intertextuality, and Theology in Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Self-Borrowed Imitation Masses

This dissertation investigates the masses of Tomás Luis de Victoria in illuminating ways. The author crafts an interdisciplinary framework that includes not only musicology, history, and archival methods but also neuroscience, studies of cognition, and ethnographic methods, among others. They use this framework to argue that by deploying musical imitation in different ways, Victoria’s choral works not only made significant contributions to the theological discourses of the Counter-Reformation, but that they were also important for the self-fashioning of both the composer and his singers. The author’s incorporation of digital humanities through the use of the CRIM (Citations: Renaissance Imitation Mass) project’s resources exemplifies their ability to unite traditional methods and objects of study with novel interventions and theoretical lenses.

Annie Kim is an original, expansive thinker. Her dissertation project, “Utopias in Opera: Politics, Tensions, and Re-Enchantments,” is ambitious and wide-ranging, drawing on substantial archival research to confront both historical and urgent present-day questions about race, identity, and politics. An accomplished and impassioned communicator, Ms. Kim inspires with her commitment to music and scholarship as meaningful tools for resistance in troubled times.

The committee agrees: “Something radiates off the page” when Christina Smiley writes about her scholarly priorities and how they connect to her personal journey. Ms. Smiley is a bold, insightful musicologist-performer whose research on large-scale sacred choral music by Black composers promises to bring critical intersectional perspective to an under-examined topic. At this early stage of her doctoral program, Ms. Smiley is already emerging as a leader with an incisive analytical skillset and a compelling voice for our field.

Proposed Dissertation Title: Sounding Russian Manchuria: Musical Circulation and Imperial Imagination

The excellence and originality of Gourley’s dissertation stood out even in the context of the outstanding pool of applications the committee received. In it, he documents a florescence of Russian operatic performance and recording activity in the colonial dependency of “Manchuria,” as it was known, during the war-riven decades of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Based on his original work with primary materials (including newly digitized 78 rpm recordings) and interviews with surviving former residents of Harbin, Gourley reveals a nuanced social politics of Russian opera recordings, touring artists and companies, and opera productions in this contested borderland. With its keen attention to the complex production and reception of Russian opera in this multi-ethnic opera capital across successive Russian, Chinese, and Japanese regimes, Gourley’s dissertation is a model for musicological scholarship on Russian opera’s imperial and inter-imperial entanglements and invites future engagement with such entanglements in Northeast Asia and beyond.