简介

Elizabeth joined Northeastern University as Dean of the College of Arts, Media, and Design and Professor of Music in July 2015. A leader and an accomplished scholar, Elizabeth came to Northeastern from the New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was a professor of musicology. Elizabeth was the inaugural director of the New Zealand School of Music from 2006 to 2013, overseeing a number of successful initiatives to advance the school’s academic and research programs and international profile. She crafted a vision for the school, providing rigorous musical and academic leadership across disciplines, fostering new modes of interaction between music and other disciplines, and recruiting outstanding faculty from across the globe. During her seven-year tenure as director, Elizabeth’s accomplishments included overhauling the curriculum to enhance professional training, improving the research-teaching nexus, and increasing cross-disciplinary collaboration. She facilitated the creation of a joint PhD program between music and Engineering, and her leadership established the preeminence of the NZSM’s research faculty in the 2012 national research quality evaluation. On the operational side, she successfully managed the merger of two very different music institutions—Massey’s Conservatorium of Music and Victoria’s School of Music—while also implementing sound financial management and creating a new leadership structure within the school. Prior to her tenure at the New Zealand School of Music, Elizabeth held both faculty and administrative leadership positions at the University of Virginia, where she worked to forge relationships across a range of disciplines from media studies and women’s studies to engineering. As director of undergraduate programs in the McIntire Department of Music, she administered an innovative bachelor’s program that received national acclaim. As director of graduate programs, she led a Ph.D. in music that created a novel and inclusive approach to graduate training, reshaping disciplinary boundaries. As chair of the department, she recruited outstanding faculty, increased the department’s visibility and fundraising profile, and built upon the distinctive undergraduate and graduate programs at UVA. Throughout Elizabeth’s academic career, she has received numerous grants and fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lilly Teaching Fellowship, the University of Virginia Sesquicentennial Associate for the Centre for Advanced Studies, and the Thomas Jefferson Visiting Fellowship at Downing College, Cambridge University. Elizabeth was founding Assistant Editor and later Associate Editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal, and is currently a member of the executive board of the American Institute of Verdi Studies and an editorial board member of Verdi Forum. Her critical edition of Verdi’s Il corsaro (published by The University of Chicago Press) has received performances around the world, including at Covent Garden, Trieste, Parma, and Barcelona, and is widely available in a DVD video recording. She has published in leading academic journals and presses on the operas of Verdi, Donizetti, and Puccini. Her current work blends approaches from the fields of musicology, Italian Risorgimento history, trauma studies and recent work in the neuroscience of music and emotion to propose a new understanding of Verdi’s middle period operas. Elizabeth studied piano at the Manhattan School of Music and in Vienna, and later received her bachelor’s degree from Smith College and her master’s degree and Ph.D., both in musicology, from Cornell University. She was awarded an AMS 50 Fellowship for her dissertation on Verdi.