Simon Music Center, M325E
Education
- B.A., Bachelor of Arts, Swarthmore College, 1995
- M.A., Master of Arts, Yale University, 2001
- Ph.D., Doctor of Philosophy, Yale University, 2001
Biography
Ayana O. Smith is associate dean for faculty affairs, research, and creative activity at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where she is also professor of musicology, chair of the Musicology Department, and affiliated with IU Renaissance Studies. In her associate dean role, she manages the tenure and promotion process for the Jacobs School, develops policy pertaining to faculty issues, and promotes faculty research and creative activity.
Smith’s research work centers on interdisciplinary and intertextual approaches to the repertories of seventeenth-century Italian opera and African American music. She is the author of the 2024 book Inclusive Music Histories: Leading Change through Research and Pedagogy (Routledge) and the 2019 book Dreaming with Open Eyes: Opera, Aesthetics, and Perception in Arcadian Rome (University of California Press). Her articles appear in Historical Performance, Eighteenth-Century Music, Music in Art, and Popular Music, and a colloquy contribution appears in the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
Smith has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), and National Endowment for the Humanities. In spring of 2022, she was a residential fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University.
She serves on the board of directors for the American Handel Society and the editorial board of Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment. She previously served as vice president for the Society of Seventeenth-Century Music and on the Council of the American Musicological Society.
Smith completed her doctorate in music history at Yale University and her undergraduate degrees in Latin and music at Swarthmore College.