Please welcome the newest addition to the Music Department faculty, Assistant Professor, Lidia Chang! Chang’s work as a musicologist and flutist expands across musical eras, cultures, and countries. Born into an interracial/bi-national family from Houston, her personal background has greatly influenced her perspective on the conceptual boundaries of gender, nationality, and class. Her studies specialize in examining the intersection of gender, literature, print culture, organology, and music performance, with her current primary focus being “the performance of ‘gentlemanliness’ through music praxis in England’s Georgian era.”
Chang’s accomplishments as a scholar include working as a research fellow at the Musée de la Musique of the Philharmonie de Paris, which she began after receiving her PhD in Musicology from the City University of New York, and teaching courses in music history at Brooklyn College, Queens College, and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. And, while her experience in academia alone is tremendous, she also manages an expansive career in performance, holding a double major in Flute Performance and Music History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, being a member of period instrument ensembles (Arcadia Players, Dorian Baroque, and Ensemble Musica Humana of which she is a founding member), and having released two albums of Regency era dance music (Twelve Cotillions by Giovanni Gallini, 1710 and Country Dances by Thomas Skillern, 1781).
During Block 1, Chang co-taught the course Listening to Music with Associate Professor and Chair, Ryan Bañagale. We are excited about her new course Music and Gender in Jane Austen’s England that is being offered in block 3. Chang leads an active lifestyle as a runner, wife to Sebastian Kirsch, and a new mother to Emanuel. If you want to know more about Lidia, feel free to stop by her website. Stick around campus long enough, and you may hear her take to the stage with her Irish flute.