Emily Abrams Ansari
Associate Professor
Office: TC 222
Phone: (519) 661-2111 x85387
Email: emily.ansari@uwo.ca
Emily Abrams Ansari, PhD is an associate professor of music history who focuses on 20th-century art, popular, and folk music. She is also Assistant Dean of Research for the Don Wright Faculty of Music. She joined the faculty in 2007.
Before coming to Western, 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.
Ansari teaches courses on recent music history at Western at the undergraduate and graduate level. Her graduate student advisees are engaged in a range of projects pertaining to 20th- and 21st-century music, particularly music composed in the Americas.
Ansari’s research explores politics and identity as they pertain to music, particularly focusing on national identity and music, protest song, and music and feminism in the second half of the twentieth century. She has won a number of major prizes for her work, including the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award, the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, the Kurt Weill Prize, and the Society for American Music's Cambridge University Press Award. Many of her journal publications and book chapters and her first book, The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War (OUP, 2018), consider the effect of the Cold War on American classical music.
Ansari is currently participating in a collaborative, interdisciplinary, historical memory project, Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador, which seeks to document the experiences of subsistence farmers during that country's civil war in the 1980s. This project is funded by a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership grant. As lead of the music team, she is working with students and collaborators to create a digital song archive, examine music at massacre commemorations and in Salvadoran educational settings, study individual wartime musicians, and facilitate historical memory workshops. Her team's overarching goal is to document music's social, psychological, and political functions during this conflict.
Ansari is also involved in several other projects. With Michael Sy Uy and Daniel Boomhower, she is co-editing a volume of essays on the history of music in Washington DC—the outgrowth of a successful symposium that happened at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, in 2023. in Washington, DC. She has also recently embarked upon a study of Canadian minimalist composer Ann Southam. In 2021–23, she was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Society for American Music.
Representative publications
“Russia.” In Bernstein in Context. Edited by Elizabeth Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
"Serialism in North America." The Cambridge Companion to Serialism, ed. Martin Iddon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023.
“The Benign American Exceptionalism of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man,”The Musical Quarterly 103/3-4 (Fall-Winter 2020): 246–80.
The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
"Musical Americanism, Cold War Consensus Culture, and the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Composers' Exchange, 1958–1960,"The Musical Quarterly 97/3 (Fall 2014): 360–389.
For more information on Ansari’s teaching and research, see her website and blog at www.emilyabramsansari.com
