Photo: Shawn Robertson
Emily Abrams Ansari
Emily Abrams Ansari is assistant dean of research and associate professor of music history at Western University in Canada and heads up the music team of the Surviving Memory project. Her scholarly research examines music’s political usages and engagements across the Americas. Her 2017 book, The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War, explored the effects of the Cold War on musical nationalism in the United States and classical composers' involvement with federally-funded cultural diplomacy initiatives. Her work has received a number of prizes and awards, including the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award, the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, the Kurt Weill Prize, and the Society for American Music's Cambridge University Press Award. She also recently completed a term as editor of the Journal of the Society for American Music. As lead of the music team, she is helping create a digital song archive, examining music at massacre commemorations and in educational settings, studying individual Salvadoran musicians, and facilitating historical memory workshops. Other current projects include co-editing a volume of essays on the history of music in Washington, DC and a study of Canadian composer Ann Southam.