Carol Oja

Who is Carol Oja?

Carol J. Oja is a musicologist and scholar of American Studies. Since 2003, she has held the post of William Powell Mason Professor at Harvard University. Her previous appointments have been at the College of William and Mary and the City University of New York, where she was professor of music at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, as well as director of the Institute for Studies in American Music. She attended St. Olaf College, the University of Iowa, and the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

Her main fields of study include 20th-century American modernism, musical theater, and cross-cultural composition, and her work positions composers and their music within broad historical contexts. She often explores sites of musical intersection and hybridity, whether having to do with race, genre, cultural hierarchy, or geographic origin, and she probes institutional frameworks for music-making, as well as patronage. The composers she has written about include Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, George Gershwin, Colin McPhee, Ruth Crawford Seeger, William Grant Still, and Virgil Thomson. Her principal books include: