Dr. Emily Ansari

Biography

Emily Abrams Ansari is an Associate Professor in the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western University, specializing in music history with a focus on 20th-century art, popular, and folk music. She became the Assistant Dean of Research and has been with the faculty since 2007. Ansari holds a BA from Durham University, an MSt from Oxford University, and a PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University. Her teaching encompasses courses on recent music history for both undergraduate and graduate students, as well as advising graduate students on projects related to 20th and 21st-century music. Her research delves into the intersections of politics and identity in music, particularly examining national identity and the role of protest songs and feminist themes in music from the mid-20th century. She has received several prestigious awards, including the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award and the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. Ansari's publications include contributions to journals and the book 'Sound Superpower: Musical Americanism in the Cold War' which reflects on the impact of the Cold War on American classical music. Furthermore, she is involved in a significant collaborative project titled 'Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador', which aims to document the experiences of subsistence farmers during the country's civil war in the 1980s. The project is funded by a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership grant, with Ansari leading a team focused on analyzing the sociopolitical functions of music during the conflict.

Research Interests