About

I write about music, history, and culture, both as a scholar and as a critic. I am an Assistant Professor of Music in the Department of Humanities & Arts at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

My first book, Dreaming in Ensemble: How Black Artists Transformed American Opera, is out now from Harvard University Press. The book is a cultural history of the remarkable people – singers, composers, critics, teachers, and listeners – who reimagined the meanings of opera within and beyond African American communities during the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the artistic and political impact of a vast range of operatic activities, from the Afrodiasporic compositions of artist-intellectual Shirley Graham to the virtuosic performances of soprano Caterina Jarboro to the trenchant music criticism of writer Nora Douglas Holt.

I also write frequently for public audiences. For example, I’ve written for Boston Lyric Opera about feminist dystopias, for The New Yorker about the New Orleans company OperaCréole, and for National Sawdust Log about making music in the midst of political crisis. In 2016, I received the Rubin Prize for Music Criticism.

I received a Ph.D. in American Studies and African American Studies from Yale University in 2019. While at Yale, I also earned a master’s concentration in Public Humanities. My dissertation was awarded Yale’s Sylvia Ardyn Boone Prize and the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Award; it was also the finalist for the Society of American Historians’ Allan Nevins Prize. Previously, I was Assistant Director of Studies and Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University.

You can reach me at lcaplan at wpi dot edu or lucymcaplan at gmail dot com.