Professor, Afroamerican and African Studies/Women's and Gender Studies/Residential College
About
Naomi André is a professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Residential College Arts, Ideas in the Humanities program at the University of Michigan. She received her BA in music from Barnard College and MA and PhD in musicology from Harvard University. Her research focuses on opera and issues surrounding gender, voice, and race. Her publications include topics on Italian opera, Schoenberg, women composers, and teaching opera in prisons. Her books, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (2006) and Blackness in Opera (2012, edited collection) focus on opera from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries and explore constructions of gender, race, and identity. She recently published Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement with University of Illinois Press, a monograph on staging race and history in opera today in the United States and South Africa. She has served on the Graduate Alumni Council for Harvard University’s Graduate School of Art and Sciences, the Executive Committee for the Criminal Justice Program at the American Friends Service Committee (Ann Arbor, MI), and has served as an evaluator for the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program.
In 2019, Naomi was named the inaugural Scholar in Residence at the Seattle Opera. In her role, she advises Seattle Opera staff and leadership on matters of race and gender in opera; consults in artistic planning as it relates to the representation of race and gender; and participates in company panel discussions, podcast recordings, and contributes essays to opera programs.
Recent Courses
19th-century Italian Opera
Race and Identity in Music
History of the Symphony
Gender and Music
Selected Articles
“Women’s Roles in Meyerbeer’s Operas: How Italian Heroines are Reflected in French Grand Opera” in Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu. Edited by Victoria Johnson, Jane Fulcher and Thomas Ertman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, 87-114.
“Entering the Present: Music Meets Race.” Action, Criticism, Theory for Music Education. (volume 4, no. 3, 2005: 1-12). [http://mas.siue.edu/ACT/index.html].
“Teaching Opera in Prison,” in The Intersectional Approach: Transforming Women’s and Gender Studies through Race, Class, and Gender, eds. Michele Tracy Berger and Kathleen Guidroz. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming.
Books Published
Blackness in Opera, ed. University of Illinois Press, 2012.
Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera, Indiana University Press, 2006.
