Zachary Stewart

Zachary Lee Nazar Stewart, a Ph.D. candidate in music history, studies French music-making during and following the Second World War, exploring how non-avant-garde operas engaged with contemporaneous events and political issues. His dissertation examines how French listeners used operas, often on historical subjects, to process the violence of the German occupation, the flourishing of authoritarian and conservative politics, postwar entanglements in colonial Indochina and Algeria, and Franco-German rapprochement. Through these operas he considers the role of music in mediating between collective historical memories, and contemporary politics and identities.

In 2021-2022 Zac conducted archival research in Paris, funded by a Georges Lurcy Fellowship and as a visiting scholar (pensionnaire étranger) at the École normale supérieure. In 2020 he received an M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet Research Grant from the American Musicological Society. Recent papers stemming from his dissertation include “Darius Milhaud, Simón Bolívar, and Hugo Chávez”; “Processing Trauma in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites” at the 2022 American Musicological Society Annual Meeting; and “What happened to Mère Marie?” at the 2023 Transnational Opera Studies Conference.

Prior to coming to Yale, Zac took an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, funded by a Dr. Herchel Smith Fellowship. He holds a B.A. from Williams College, where he was awarded the Shirley Stanton Prize in Music and Highest Honors in Music, and spent a year as a visiting undergraduate at the University of Oxford under the auspices of the Williams-Exeter Programme. In addition to his research on French music, Zac also retains interests in music-text relationships, global music histories, material studies, and queer musicology.