Ayana Smith
Ayana Smith, Assistant Professor of Musicology, received her B.A. with honors
in Latin and Music at Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. in Music History
at Yale University. Her dissertation, entitled "Opera in Arcadia: Rome, Florence and Venice in the Primo settecento," explores the effect of Arcadian literary reform on selected early eighteenth-century operas by George Frideric Handel, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Antonio Caldara. She has been a recipient of the Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellowship and various Social Science Research Council-Mellon research grants. Her primary musicological interests are relationships between literary criticism and vocal music, especially in the fields of Italian Baroque opera and African-American music. Her article entitled "Blues, Criticism and the Signifying Trickster" was published recently in the journal Popular Music. Current projects include research on the mock-heroic genre in works by Arcadian librettist Girolamo Gigli, the importance of Neo-Platonism and gender in early Arcadian criticism, and female trickster narratives in the African-American folk blues tradition. |