Amy Lynn Wlodarski
American music historian
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Amy Lynn Wlodarski is an American music historian. A 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the author of Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation (2015) and George Rochberg, American Composer (2019) and is a professor at Dickinson College.
Amy Lynn Wlodarski | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Historian |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship (2024) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | The Sounds of Memory: German Musical Representations of the Holocaust, 1945–1965 (2006) |
| Kim H. Kowalke | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Music history |
Sub-discipline | Jewish music |
| Institutions | Dickinson College |
Biography
Amy Wlodarski was born to Terri and Fred Wlodarski,[1] and her maternal grandmother was among millions subject to forced labour under German rule during World War II.[2] She attended Orono High School in Orono, Maine,[1] and she obtained her BA (1997) at Middlebury College and MA (2001) and PhD (2006) at Eastman School of Music;[3] her doctoral dissertation The Sounds of Memory: German Musical Representations of the Holocaust, 1945–1965 was supervised by Kim H. Kowalke.[4] During her postgraduate studies, she was given a German-American Fulbright Program scholarship to study at Free University of Berlin and spent some time living in the Greater Boston area for her doctorate.[1]
Wlodarski moved to Dickinson College in 2005, and she began working as a professor there.[2] She won the Oral History Association Postsecondary Teaching Award in 2010.[5] She became the Charles A. Dana Endowed Chair in 2021.[2] She was a resident director for Dickinson's abroad study program in Italy from 2022 until 2024.[3]
Wlodarski specializes in the relationship between Jewish music and World War II and the Holocaust.[3] In 2011, she and Elaine Kelly were co-editors of Art Outside the Lines, an essay volume on the East German arts.[6] She won the 2016 Lewis Lockwood Award for her book Musical Witness and Holocaust Representation,[7] which its publisher Cambridge University Press called the "first musicological study entirely devoted to a comprehensive analysis of musical Holocaust representations in the Western art music tradition".[8] She won the 2020 Book Prize of the American Musicological Society Jewish Studies and Music Group for her next book George Rochberg, American Composer (2020),[9] which explores how George Rochberg's personal trauma influenced his work.[10]
In 2022, Wlodarski became editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society.[2] In 2024, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Research;[11] as part of the fellowship, her next historical project is on the international reception of the Viktor Ullmann opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis.[3]
Outside of academia, Wlodarski also works as Dickinson's choir director, as well as a live event presenter at operas and philharmonics.[3]
On July 12, 2008, she married Jeremy Ball, a history professor at Dickinson.[12]