Elissa Harbert, Associate Professor, is an award-winning musicologist specializing in musical theater, with broad expertise in music of the United States and Europe. Her research focuses on Broadway musicals as they intersect with gender, race and ethnicity, reception history, historiography, cultural memory, and historical representation in dramatic productions for stage and screen.
Research for her current book project, “Unlikely Subjects”: History Musicals and the Challenges of Presenting the Past on Broadway, was awarded the Society for American Music’s Virgil Thomson Fellowship. She has published several articles on history musicals such as Hamilton and 1776 in the journals American Music, where she also was the Book Review Editor from 2016-2019, and Studies in Musical Theatre, where she currently serves on the Editorial Board. She has contributed several chapters to books including The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical and The Palgrave Handbook of Musical Theatre Producers. Dr. Harbert was a recipient of the American Musicological Society’s Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship. She has presented research at numerous national and international conferences.
Dr. Harbert teaches a wide range of musicology courses that explore issues of race, gender, and the cultural contexts of music spanning a wide range of genres, times, and places. Her teaching emphasizes critical thinking skills, writing, self-reflection, and learning through discussion. She regularly teaches courses such as History of Broadway Musicals, Music and the Vietnam War, Women in Western Music, Exoticism, History of Western Music Surveys, Senior Seminar, Musicking, and Exploring Music in History and Culture.
Before arriving at DePauw in 2015, Dr. Harbert taught at Northwestern University and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Macalester College. She completed her PhD in Musicology at Northwestern University with a cognate in U.S. cultural history. She earned a Bachelor of Music magna cum laude in oboe performance from Lawrence University and a Master’s degree in oboe performance from Wichita State University, where she played in the Wichita Symphony Orchestra.
