Rena Roussin
Email: rroussi@uwo.ca
Rena Roussin is a scholar of classical (“art”) music’s relationships to concepts of equity, embodiment, and social justice in historic and current contexts. She has particular research expertise on changing concepts of disability and gender in Austro-German music at the end of the long eighteenth century, and Indigenous-led classical music initiatives in twenty-first century North America. Rena is especially interested in ways music might contribute to Indigenous equity on Turtle Island, musical repa/matriation, and community-based and community-led research, interests that are shaped both by her European settler ancestry as well as her experiences as a reconnecting Indigenous person with heritage from the Haida and Métis communities. Rena completed her PhD in musicology at the University of Toronto in 2026, and also holds an MA in musicology from the University of Victoria and a BA Honours in music from Acadia University.
As a postdoctoral associate at the Don Wright Faculty of Music, Rena is currently working on her first monograph, Identities, Indigeneities, Intersectionalities: Positioning Contemporary Opera in Canada, which interweaves her expertise in opera studies, historical research, and ethnographic methods to analyze constructions and reflections of equity-deserving communities in opera in Canada from 2010 to the present. Her previous and forthcoming publications appear in Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music, the Journal of Musicology Pedagogy, and with Bloomsbury, Cambridge, and Oxford University Presses. Together with Bridget Cauthery, Emma Hassencahl-Perley, and Amy Hull, Rena has co-authored Contemporary Indigenous Ballet in Canada: Resituating In the Land of the Spirits, which is slated for 2028 publication with Goose Lane Editions, in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the premiere of John Kim Bell’s Indigenous-led ballet.
A committed public musicologist and educator, Rena serves as musicologist-in-residence for the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, on the Canadian Opera Company’s Circle of Artists, and also co-designed the soon-to-be-launched mass online open access course Foundations of Equity in Music Studies throughout her time at the University of Toronto, where she won a Faculty of Music Teaching Award in 2022. She is also Secretary of the American Musicological Society’s Music and Disability Study Group and on the Board of Directors of the Haydn Society of North America.
Research Interests:
- Music and social justice (emphasis on opera and classical music)
- Music and intersectional/equity-deserving identity constructions and representations
- Music and/as activism
- Strategies of anti-coloniality in opera and art music in North America
- Music and disability studies
- Opera studies
- Community-led research; ethics in fieldwork
- Musical repa/matriation
- Haydn studies
- Eighteenth-century studies (ca. 1750-1810)
- Music history pedagogy and the scholarship of teaching and learning
