Ellie M. Hisama (she/her)

Areas of Interest

• Critical Asian/American studies
• Asian diasporic art, music, and culture
• Black studies, sound, and performance
• AI & creative work
• visual arts, especially pottery and kintsugi

Biography

Ellie M. Hisama is Distinguished Professor of Music, Society, and Culture at the University of Toronto, past Dean of the Faculty of Music, and Professor Emerita of Music at Columbia University. A social historian and music theorist, she has published widely on gender, sexuality, and race in musical modernity, North American and British popular music, and sound and culture.

She is a member of the Science, Technology, and Social Values Lab at the Institute for Advanced Study and was the Edward T. Cone Member in Music Studies and a Visitor in its School of Social Science. She is writing a book on the composer and musician Julius Eastman.

In Canada and the U.S., she has created learning opportunities in digital sound for female-identifying and gender nonconforming youth of colour, establishing the programs Future Sound 6 at the UofT and For the Daughters of Harlem at Columbia. She has worked with numerous international bodies dedicated to anti-racist agendas in the arts and the academy including Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity. With WGSI, the Political Science Department, and Volcano Theatre, she co-organized the event Reimagining Opera through Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha: A Black Feminist Conversation; the panel We Have to Reimagine: A Conversation about Anti-Asian Racism and Violence; and a screening and talkback to celebrate Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston. She was named an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society, a lifetime achievement award that recognizes her contributions to musicology, her distinguished teaching career, and her commitment to creating a more diverse, inclusive, and ethical profession.

Education

PhD, City University of New York, Graduate Center

MA, Queens College, City University of New York

BA, University of Chicago; BM, Queens College, City University of New York

Selected Works

“‘They want us to tell their story’: My sky of listening.” Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture 5/4 (2024): 443-60.

“For the Daughters of Harlem: Bridging Campus and Community through Sound.”Co-authored with Lucie Vágnerová. In Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st century, ed. Carol J. Oja and Charles Hiroshi Garrett. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.

“‘Blackness in a white void’: Dissonance and Ambiguity in Isaac Julien’s Multi-Screen Film Installations.” In Rethinking Difference in Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Music: Theory and Politics of Ambiguity, ed. Gavin Lee, 168-183. New York: Routledge, 2018.

“‘Diving into the Earth’: The Musical Worlds of Julius Eastman.” In Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Olivia Bloechl, Jeffrey Kallberg, and Melanie Lowe, 260-86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

“‘We’re All Asian Really’: Hip Hop’s Afro-Asian Crossings.” In Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies, edited by Ellie M. Hisama and Evan Rapport, 1-21. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Institute for Studies in American Music, 2005.

Teaching

Undergraduate Courses:

WGS 4___ Feminist Listening: Intersectional Approaches to North American Popular Music