Dr. Mary Ingraham

Dr. Mary Ingraham is Professor of Musicology at the University of Alberta. She has held the post of Director of Liberal Studies in the Faculty of Extension, and prior to joining the University of Alberta, was an active artists’ manager, agent, and arts administrator. Her primary academic interest is the socio-political context of music in Canada and she is currently studying music and texts by composers that respond to expressive modes from European and Aboriginal cultures, as well as the perspectives and cultures of New Canadians working within Canadian society. Her research focuses on historical and contemporary issues relating to representations of culture in music, the politics of creation of cultural objects, and expressions of intercultural exchange.

Dr. Ingraham is the author of published work on Canadian opera and on aspects Johannes Brahms’s choral music, including foundational research for a catalogue of Canadian dramatic music, and on the reception and dramatic response to Brahms’s cantata Rinaldo, op.50. Her catalogue of Canadian staged, dramatic music is available in print and is currently being digitized for online access. Dr. Ingraham has created multiple web-based educational projects for the Canadian Music Centre, including  Influences of Music in Canada, Sound Progressions, and Sound Adventures. She is the principal investigator of a three-year SSHRC-funded project entitled “The Social Efficacy of Art Music Partnerships in Canada” that examines historical and current collaborative, interdisciplinary art music projects to consider ways of assessing the effectiveness and value of community partnerships.

Additional recent projects include research in the areas of opera and race, the aestheticization of affect, and an examination of choral and dramatic music by composers Malcolm Forsyth and Barbara Pentland.  Dr. Ingraham is co-coordinator with Dr. Dylan Robinson of the national working group on Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Music of Canada and an executive member of the Canadian University Music Society (2010-2016).

Brianna Wells

Brianna Wells is a doctoral candidate at the University of Alberta in the Department of English and Film Studies. Her dissertation investigates the material circulation of opera texts through North American production, media, and print cultures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She argues that opera’s media genealogy bears heavily on the contradictory inertia surrounding the term “opera” in public discourses. Brianna has published in 19th Century Music and Opera America magazine. Her doctoral research has been supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Canada Graduate Scholarship.

Other Research Assistants

• Jeff Arsenault (Graduate Research Assistant)
• Jessica Rogers (Undergraduate Research Assistant)
• Alyssa Kim (Undergraduate Research Assistant)