FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music is pleased to announce the appointment of Lynn Hooker as associate professor of music in musicology, effective Aug. 1, pending approval of the IU Board of Trustees.
From 2016 to present, Hooker has served as associate professor of music at Purdue University, where she was part of the team that inaugurated a bachelor’s degree in music program.
After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and spending two years on the faculty at the University of Richmond, Hooker came to Indiana University from 2003 to 2015 with an appointment in Hungarian studies in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies. During that time, she taught courses in Central Eurasian studies in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and in the Musicology Department at Jacobs, where she was a regular participant in the colloquium series and other departmental events as an affiliated faculty member.
“We couldn’t be happier to welcome Lynn Hooker back to the faculty of the Jacobs Musicology Department and look forward to it being her long-term academic home,” said Abra Bush, David Henry Jacobs Bicentennial Dean.
Hooker studies music, identity, heritage and markets in nineteenth- to twenty-first-century East-Central Europe, particularly in Hungary. Her book “Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók” was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. She has published on music and modernism, nationalism, race and popular and folk culture in outlets including Musical Quarterly, Ethnomusicology and Anthropology of East Europe Review, among others.
Since 2000, Hooker has conducted fieldwork in Europe and North America in Hungarian folk and popular music scenes, with a focus on Romani performers. Her current project uses oral history interviews and archival research to examine the transformation of Hungary’s “Gypsy music” industry since the early twentieth century; this book-in-progress is organized around the Rajkó Ensemble, which was founded in 1952 as the Romani band of Hungary’s League of Young Communists and continues to exist today despite many challenges.
“I am delighted to welcome Lynn Hooker back to the Musicology Department,” said Ayana Smith, department chair. “She has been a valued colleague for many years, and her work will make an important contribution to our teaching and research profile.”