The Department is pleased to announce the appointment of Lindsay Wright, PhD 2018, as Assistant Professor of Music at the Yale Department of Music, beginning July 1, 2022. Wright was previously a Humanities Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow and most recently served as Executive Director of the Hyde Park Youth Symphony.
Wright is an educator and scholar dedicated to investigating the historical relationship between musical performance, pedagogy, and systems of privilege in the United States. Her current projects range from the career of Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, to the racial politics of the Suzuki Method, to reality television’s staging of meritocratic fantasies. Her PhD dissertation, “Discourses of Musical Talent in American Culture,” was the first music project to be awarded the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation’s dissertation fellowship. She holds a BA in African American Studies and Music from Wesleyan University, as well as an MEd in Multicultural Education from Eastern University. Her research interests include musical talent, genius, and giftedness; African American history; 19th-century music; Afrofuturism; disability studies; animal studies; and childhood studies.
In 2021-22 Wright will hold an ACLS Fellowship, during which she will work on a book manuscript entitled The Suzuki Industrial Complex: Race, Class, and Talent in American Classical Music. She will do a large portion of this work in New Haven while on research leave and looks forward to participating in Yale’s intellectual and musical communities as time allows.