Carol Oja (Ph.D. Music, '85) Elected to American Academy for Arts and Sciences

May 2, 2019

Oja is a leading musicologist who is currently the William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University

Carol Oja (Ph.D. ’85, Music), a leading musicologist who is currently the William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University, was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, one of the oldest and most prestigious learned societies in the United States.
 
Oja specializes in American composers of the 20th century. She is also the director of graduate studies in music at Harvard, and previously taught in The Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Music and at Brooklyn College’s Conservatory of Music. In 2013, she served on the Pulitzer Prize committee for music and was the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence at the New York Philharmonic. 
 
In 2014, Oja was awarded the President’s Alumni Medal at The Graduate Center’s 50th Commencement. In his remarks, then-President Chase F. Robinson noted that Oja’s writing and lectures have deepened our understanding of Bernstein.
 
Among her many publications are Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of WarMaking Music Modern: New York in the 1920s; and Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds. Oja is currently working on a project tentatively titled “Black Virtuosos and Civil Rights: Performing Racial Desegregation after World War II.”