Classes

This undergraduate course was initiated with Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Michael Uy, and Caitlin Schmid through support from the Mindich Fund for Engaged Scholarship. In the course, students worked with local musicians who have recently immigrated to the Boston area, offering...

The course explored methodologies in American Studies. It also initiated a collaborative project (with Christina Linklater of the Harvard Music Library) curating an exhibit about the scholar Eileen Southern and her pathbreaking book The Music of Black Americans (first...

Graduate seminar on “Race and American Musical Theater,” taught to coincide with A.R.T.’s production of The Black Clown. Davóne Tines (the show’s star) and Michael Schachter (its composer) visited class.

Every couple of years, I give a freshman seminar on Broadway musicals, which is usually tied to an A.R.T. production.

Warren Center Seminar, “Cultural Reverberations of World War,” co-directed with Nancy Cott. A series of Ph.D. dissertations emerged from this year-long course.

Undergraduate seminar organized in collaboration with Barbara Haws, Archivist and Historian of the Philharmonic. Class guests included Jamie Bernstein. Students traveled to NYC for a weekend interviewing longtime subscribers of the orchestra who have memories of the YPC...

Undergraduate course in musical theater, which was tied to the appointment of Broadway composer Jason Robert Brown as Blodgett Artist-in-Residence. That year his show The Bridges of Madison County opened on Broadway. The class focused on Brown’s output, as well as on the...

Graduate seminar on blackface minstrelsy, which culminated in a student-curated exhibit of materials drawn from the Harvard Theatre Collection. Exhibit opened in the Harvard Music Library on January 26, 2015, with a keynote by Professor Louis Chude-Sokei and vocal-banjo...

Undergraduate/graduate seminar on “The Operas of John Adams” with Anne Shreffler. Adams and his collaborators (including Peter Sellars) visited the course, and we brought the class to New York City to see the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Nixon in China.

Graduate seminar on African American Musical Theater, taught in conjunction with the A.R.T. production of Porgy and Bess.

A new General-Education course, “American Musicals and American Culture,” with a website of primary sources from the Harvard Theatre Collection, which was under construction for several years. The site was built by Ryan Bañagale and Drew Massey, two graduate students in...

Seminar team-taught with Kay Kaufman Shelemay. The course involved hands-on and archival research about Bernstein’s childhood and adolescence in the greater Boston area. Students from the course presented papers the following fall for Harvard’s Bernstein Festival, which I co...