Melinda Boyd

Melinda Boyd is Director of the School of Music and Professor of Musicology and History. She earned her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) in 2002, an MA in Musicology from UBC in 1996, and a Bachelor of Music – History from the University of Manitoba, 1994. Prior to her appointment at UNI in 2008, as visiting faculty at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, Boyd taught a wide range of courses for graduate and undergraduate students, including historical survey classes, research and writing, topics classes (program music, the music of Robert and Clara Schumann, Wagner), genre classes (opera history, German Romantic Opera), and music in culture topics (popular music, music and politics). At UNI, Dr. Boyd teaches upper-level and graduate courses in American music, opera history, history and literature of the orchestra, and music and politics, protest, and social justice. Her research focuses on women composers and performers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, issues of gender and feminist theory, cultural studies, aesthetics, and popular music. Dr. Boyd has presented her research at a number of national and international conferences, including the Society for American Music, the Society for Music Theory, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the American Musicological Society, and the Canadian University Music Society. She has published articles in 19th-Century Music, Music Research Forum, the Journal of Singing, and in an interdisciplinary collection of essays entitled A Vision of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of Madam Butterfly (University of Toronto Press, 2006). With Dr. Karin Pendle (Emeritus Faculty, University of Cincinnati), Dr. Boyd is co-author of Women in Music: A Research and Information Guide (2nd edition, Routledge, 2010). Her article, “Have You Met Miss Jones? The Politics of Color in Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones,” was published in a collection of essays entitled Blackness in Opera (Illinois, 2012); a monograph, Three Women Opera Composers: A Musicological Interpretation of Ingeborg von Bronsart, Ethel Smyth, and Thea Musgrave, was published in 2019. A collaboration with Maestro Dario Salvi and the Malmö Opera Orchestra resulted in the world premiere recording of Ingeborg von Bronsart’s one-act opera, Jery und Bätely (Naxos, 2019).