Allison Chu

Allison Chu is a Ph.D. student in Music History at Yale University, with research interests in American opera in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contemporary classical music, and representations of identity on and off the stage. She holds a Bachelor of Music in Clarinet Performance (2019) and a Bachelor of Arts in English (2019) from the University of Michigan. From 2017 to 2019, she worked with the University of Michigan Gershwin Initiative as an Editorial Assistant. Allison was awarded a University of Michigan EXCEL Enterprise Fund grant to research blackface minstrelsy, the representation of Black cultural life, and genre hybridity in George Gershwin’s Blue Monday. Allison is one of the founding members and current co-chair of the Grant Hagan Society, a graduate student-led affinity group that supports people of color in the Yale Department of Music. She also currently works as a graduate research assistant for the 2020-22 Mellon Sawyer Seminar at Yale, “The Order of Multitudes: Atlas, Encyclopedia, Museum,” which studies the relationship between long histories of information organization and the contemporary digital moment in the age of Big Data. Allison is invested in bridging the gap between performers and scholars, practicing public musicology through engagements such as her position as guest lecturer for the 2020 Lakes Area Music Festival and the 2021 Connecticut SummerFest, and as one of the founding members of the Midnight Oil Collective. Outside of scholarly work, Allison enjoys reading novels, traveling, and playing chamber music.