Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship
Áine Palmer
Áine’s dissertation, entitled The Chansonnier Cangé: Mensuration, Meaning, and Materiality c. 1300 reassesses the songbook F-Pn fr. 846. In asking why it is the only trouvère source to consistently use mensural notation, she explores what manuscripts can tell us about the reception of trouvère song in light of the social, cultural, and political changes of the late 13th century. In addition to receiving the Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship, Áine has received a Belgian American Education Foundation Fellowship, under the support of which she will be a visiting scholar at KU Leuven in 2025.
William F. Holmes / Frank D’Accone Dissertation Fellowship in Opera Studies
Allison Chu
Proposed dissertation title: “Documentary Opera: Archives, Identities, and Politics in Contemporary American Opera”
The sociopolitical and aesthetic reimagining of American opera remains an ongoing project in the twenty-first century, which Allison Chu analyzes in compelling detail in her dissertation, “Documentary Opera: Archives, Identities, and Politics in Contemporary American Opera.” Focusing on works incorporating documentary techniques, archival materials, and primary sources, Chu reveals how such documentary operas expand the genre’s representational capacities, transform its affordances, and challenge its history of exclusion, racism, and inequity. Chu’s musical, dramaturgical, and cultural readings are nuanced, persuasive, and theoretically grounded, drawing on and, in turn, contributing to the fields of critical race, documentary, theater, and performance studies.
Taryn Dubois
Proposed dissertation title: “Dancing Modernity: Theatrical Ballet and the Kinaesthetic Imaginary in Post-Unification Italy”
As Taryn Dubois demonstrates in her dissertation, “Dancing Modernity: Theatrical Ballet and the Kinaesthetic Imaginary in Post-Unification Italy,” the genre of ballo grande in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries comprised a spectacular mixture of art, athleticism, bodies, and technology—hence, ballet with bicycles. Such productions, Dubois argues, reflected an episteme of physical movement that formed a central but overlooked component of Italian modernity, ultimately bringing to the stage discourses of industrialization, imperialism, sport, and gender. Written with an energy befitting its subject matter, Dubois’s work sits at the intersection of dance history, mobility studies, and opera studies and ultimately constitutes a rethinking of modernist historiography.