Ellie Hisama

Biography

Ellie M. Hisama is Dean of the Faculty of Music and Professor of Music at the University of Toronto. She joined the University of Toronto in 2021, having previously taught at Columbia University as a member of the Theory and Historical Musicology areas. Her research and teaching have addressed issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, the social and political dimensions of music, and public engagement. She is the author of Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon, which was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and co-editor of the volumes Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-century American Music and Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies.

She received a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; a Tsunoda Ryusaku Senior Fellowship, Waseda University (Tokyo); and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship. She has delivered numerous international plenary and keynote addresses and was named the Kenneth H. Peacock Lecturer at the University of Toronto and the Robert Samels Visiting Scholar at Indiana University, and was selected to deliver the 2022 American Musicological Society Women and Gender Endowed Lecture.

She has taught at many institutions including Brooklyn College, the City University of New York's Graduate Center, Connecticut College, and Harvard University. She was nominated twice by Columbia College's Academic Awards Committee for the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching, and served as Director of the Institute for Studies in American Music [now the Hitchcock Institute] at Brooklyn College.

As an academic leader, she has received multiple grants for work that engages with issues of structural racism and gender and racial justice. Working with the Division of University Advancement at the University of Toronto, she helped to secure a $7-million gift to the Faculty of Music in support of a new recital hall, the Jay Telfer Forum. This gift was the largest ever received by the Faculty, and one of the most significant in support of music in Canada. At Columbia University, she was a Provost Leadership Fellow and an inaugural recipient of the Provost’s Faculty Mentoring Award. She is Founding Director of For the Daughters of Harlem: Working in Sound, an initiative that brings students from public schools to the university to create, record, and reflect upon their work in sound. She continues this project in Toronto with funding from the Nick Nurse Foundation, collaborating with colleagues at the U of T to work in its renowned Electronic Music Studio.