The Department of Music is pleased to announce that three graduate students in Musicology were recently recognized by the American Musicological Society (AMS) for their outstanding research.
Ryan Gourley is the 2025 recipient of the William F. Holmes / Frank D’Accone Dissertation Fellowship in Opera Studies for his dissertation, “Sounding Russian Manchuria: Musical Circulation and Imperial Imagination.” Praising the quality of Gourley’s academic work, the award citation states:
“The excellence and originality of Gourley’s dissertation stood out even in the context of the outstanding pool of applications the committee received. In it, he documents a fluorescence of Russian operatic performance and recording activity in the colonial dependency of “Manchuria,” as it was known, during the war-riven decades of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Based on his original work with primary materials (including newly digitized 78 rpm recordings) and interviews with surviving former residents of Harbin, Gourley reveals a nuanced social politics of Russian opera recordings, touring artists and companies, and opera productions in this contested borderland. With its keen attention to the complex production and reception of Russian opera in this multi-ethnic opera capital across successive Russian, Chinese, and Japanese regimes, Gourley’s dissertation is a model for musicological scholarship on Russian opera’s imperial and inter-imperial entanglements and invites future engagement with such entanglements in Northeast Asia and beyond.”
Additionally, the AMS awarded two Travel and Research Grants to graduate students in Musicology: Allison Jerzak and Flannery McIntyre. Allison’s award supports research on her project titled “The Musicality of Digital Data: A Theory and Material History of Digital Music and Music Recommendation, 1957-2014”; and Flannery’s award supports research on her project titled “An History of Music and Intellectual Culture, 300–900 A.D.”
The Department congratulates Ryan, Allison, and Flannery for their accomplishments, and also thanks the AMS for their support. For additional details on these AMS fellowships and awards, please visit the links below.