Our annual winter holiday luncheon will feature a talk by Professor of Music Ellie M. Hisama , who will discuss her current research on Marian Anderson's performance of spirituals arranged by African American composers.

Hisama specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, post-tonal theory, American music, popular music, gender and feminist studies, critical studies of music and race, and the social and political dimensions of music. 

In addition to her study of Anderson , Professor Hisama is currently engaged in research that focuses on Ruth Crawford's work as a composer and arranger, and the Bay Area- and Chicago-based collective  Asian Improv aRts . She is author of  Gendering Musical Modernism  and co-editor of  Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies  and  Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Worlds ,