Prof. Ingrid Monson

Professor Ingrid Monson of Harvard University lectures at the Williams College Department of Music on Thursday, Nov. 12, at 4:15 p.m. in Bernhard Music Center Room 30 on the Williams College campus. This lecture is sponsored by the Class of 1960 Scholars Fund and is free and open to the public.

Prof. Ingrid Monson’s lecture is titled, Why Authorial Copyright Matters in Popular Music: the Blurred Lines Case. She is Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, supported by the Time Warner Endowment; Graduate Advisor in Ethnomusicology and holds an appointment in both the Harvard Music Department and the Department of African and African American Studies. She was chair of the Music Department from 2005-08, and Interim Dean of Arts and Humanities at Harvard University from 2010-2011. Monson is a Guggenheim fellow, and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow of Harvard University. Her scholarship is focused on the improvisational process through the lens of social history. She authored Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (2007), Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, for which she won the Sonneck Society’s 1998 Irving Lowens Prize for the best book in American music (1996), and an edited a volume titled the African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (2000). Other recent work is Freedom Sounds: Jazz, Civil Rights, and Africa, 1950-1967 (2005). She began her career as a trumpet player and has recently been studying contemporary Senufo balafon. Monson specializes in jazz, African American music, and music of the African diaspora. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Musicology from New York University, her B.M. from New England Conservatory of Music, and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Economics.

The Class of 1960 Scholars Fund, established at their 25th Reunion, brings eminent researchers from other colleges and universities to campus to give colloquia and work with students in the classroom.