Faculty/Staff

Emily R. Pollock, Assistant Professor of Music at MIT
since September 2012. Her research interests include opera from
the bel canto era to the present, twentieth-century concert music, and
the politics of musical style. Methodologically, she has focused
particularly on the historicization of aesthetic value and a critical
reappraisal of source studies. A native Oregonian, she was trained as
an oboist and composer and earned her Bachelor of Arts in Music from
Harvard College in 2006. She subsequently earned her MA (2008) and PhD
(2012) in music history and literature at the University of
California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, "Opera after Stunde Null,"
explores the broad range of possibilities for new opera composition
following the end of World War II by examining six pieces that
premiered on the stages of West Germany in the years 1945-1965. Her
archival research in Berlin, Basel, Munich, Mainz, and Kassel has been
supported by fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service
(DAAD) and the Paul Sacher Stiftung. With her colleague Anicia Timberlake,
she organized a major international conference at UC Berkeley in
September 2011 on the topic of Music in Divided Germany. She has
presented conference papers at the AMS national meeting in
Indianapolis, at the Seventh International Conference on Music Since
1900 in Lancaster, England, at the AMS New England chapter meeting,
and at symposia in Basel, Dresden, and Graz.

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Contact:
pollock@mit.edu