Appointment of Dr. Lindsay Wright, Assistant Professor of Music

The Yale Department of Music is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Lindsay Wright as Assistant Professor of Music, beginning 1 July 2022. Professor Wright comes to us from Chicago, where she has served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and most recently as Executive Director and Conductor of the Hyde Park Youth Symphony.
 

Lindsay Wright is an educator and scholar dedicated to investigating the historical relationship between musical performance, pedagogy, and systems of privilege in the United States. Her current projects range from the career of Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, to the racial politics of the Suzuki Method, to reality television’s staging of meritocratic fantasies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2018; her dissertation, “Discourses of Musical Talent in American Culture,” was the first music project to be awarded the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation’s dissertation fellowship. She holds a B.A. in African American Studies and Music from Wesleyan University, as well as an M.Ed. in Multicultural Education from Eastern University. Her research interests include musical talent, genius, and giftedness; African American history; 19th-century music; Afrofuturism; disability studies; animal studies; and childhood studies.
 

In 2021-22 Prof. Wright will hold an ACLS Fellowship, during which she will work on a book manuscript entitled The Suzuki Industrial Complex: Race, Class, and Talent in American Classical Music. We are delighted that she will do a large portion of this work in New Haven, and although she will be on research leave, she will begin moving into her Stoeckel Hall office this summer and looks forward to participating in our intellectual and musical communities as time allows.