Emily Abrams Ansari
Dr. Emily Abrams Ansari is an Assistant Professor in Music History who focuses on 20th-century music. She joined the faculty in 2007.
Before coming to Western, Dr. Ansari received a BA from Durham University and an MSt from Oxford University (both in the United Kingdom) and in 2010 gained her PhD in Historical Musicology from Harvard University.
Dr. Ansari teaches courses on 19th- and 20th-century music history at Western at the undergraduate and graduate level. She is particularly interested in offering her students the chance to think about music in its social and political contexts, while simultaneously seeking an intimate understanding of the music itself.
Dr. Ansari is currently at work on two books. The first, tentatively entitled American Identity Transposed: Cold War Composers and Cultural Diplomacy, examines the contributions of American classical composers including Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Virgil Thomson to their government's overseas cultural diplomacy campaign between the 1950s and 1970s. The second book will examine the reasons that the US government, specifically Eisenhower's government, believed music and the arts were capable of playing a role in Cold War strategy, considering what attitudes about music's political uses underpinned their policies and how these played out in specific overseas tours by musicians.
Dr. Ansari has an article on Copland and cultural diplomacy in press at the Journal for the Society of American Music and has published several chapters in edited volumes. A presentation at the 2007 American Musicological Society meeting won her the society’s Pisk Prize.
E-mail: emily.ansari@uwo.ca
https://sites.google.com/site/emilyansari/
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