Education

• B.Mus., McGill University, 1984
• M.A. in Neuere Deutsche Philologie, Romanische Literaturen, and Musikwissenschaft, Technische Universität Berlin, 1987
• Ph.D. in Musicology, Eastman School of Music, 1994

Research

Tamara Levitz’s research focuses on the relationship between word and music in global musical and literary modernism. Her historical work in this area culminated in 2013, when she won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society for her monograph Modernist Mysteries: Perséphone, in which she explored modernism through the prism of the collaboration between Igor Stravinsky and André Gide. Since that time, she has investigated systemic racism and exclusion in the music disciplines and comparative literature in the United States, moving more firmly into critical university studies. She is currently working on articles on the settler colonial foundation of Zora Neale Hurston’s music education (through a close reading of names in Dust Tracks), and on Black exclusion in the American Society of Aesthetics. She is also completing a monograph on Critique in the Shadow of Academic Freedom, in which she examines the racial capitalist foundation of academic freedom—a concept that has come to delimit the possibility of critique in the discipline of Music Theory.  In her teaching and criticism, she is dedicated to exploring the poetics of Hip Hop within a comparative context..