Dr. Anne Searcy joined the School of Music faculty in Autumn 2020 as an assistant professor in the Music History program. Previously, she was an assistant professor in the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. She earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University in historical musicology with a dissertation on “Soviet and American Cold War Ballet Exchange, 1959–1962”. Currently, she is investigating the intersections of music, politics, and dance, and she is using dance as a means of bridging the gap between the seemingly intangible aspects of music and the immediacy of political action. Dr. Searcy's new book, Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange, recently was published by Oxford University Press. This monograph analyzes the American and Soviet cultural diplomacy programs, focusing on tours by the Bolshoi Ballet in the United States and by American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet in the Soviet Union. In addition, Dr. Searcy has also been exploring the relationship between dance and hip hop music in the Broadway show Hamilton, with an article on “Bringing Dance Back to the Center in Hamilton” published in a special issue on the musical in the journal American Music.
Dr. Searcy additionally earned her B.A. in history and music from Swarthmore College. In 2015 she was awarded an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship by the American Musicological Society, and has held a fellowship jointly at New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts and the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia. Her article “The Recomposition of Aram Khachaturian’s Spartacus at the Bolshoi Theater, 1958–1968” appeared in The Journal of Musicology, and she has presented papers at the meetings of the International Musicological Society, the American Musicological Society, the Society of Dance History Scholars, and the Society for American Music.
