Kristen Turner
MUSICOLOGIST / RESEARCHER / WRITER / SPEAKER / PEDAGOGUE / PODCASTER
I research and write about how different kinds of musical theater reflect and shape American political culture and ideas about identity. I find obscure performers and try to put their stories back into the theatrical narrative. Most of my work centers on opera, vaudeville, and musical comedies in the US between the 1870s and World War I. I've also published on music and the Civil Rights Movement.
After over thirty years as a college instructor, I recently retired, but I've taught in just about every kind of situation available at the undergraduate university level—small and large schools, HBCUs and PWIs, state-funded and private, women-only institutions and co-ed, music majors and general education students.
The Operatic Kaleidoscope
Voice, Race, and the Ragtime Popular Stage
This book explores how creators, performers, and audiences used opera as a symbol of identity in vaudeville and musical comedies at the turn of the twentieth century. In a time of deepening segregation, debates over whether women should be allowed to vote, and when the first laws limiting immigration based upon country of origin were being considered, popular entertainment was obsessed with identity.
References to opera—the genre, performances of operatic excerpts, and the operatic vocal timbre—was a way to explore issues of race, gender, and citizenship in comedy. The stakes were high, but the shows could be laugh-out loud funny, or cringe-worthy and deeply problematic. I spend a lot of time explaining the jokes in what amounts to the Saturday Night Live skits of 1900.
Most research on popular entertainment in this period focuses on one genre or one race, but my book considers Black and white musical comedies, revues, and vaudeville, as well as performers from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Along the way I introduce shows and performers who have disappeared from the historical record but once took the nation by storm. I also discuss familiar figures like Bert Williams, George Walker, James Weldon Johnson, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Irving Berlin.
Writing
My publications range from journal articles on American opera and musical theater to a pedagogy book helping collegiate instructors create a more inclusive Western music history curriculum.
Book
Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher's Guide
Winner, 2023 AMS Teaching Award for an exceptional pedagogical resource, American Musicological Society
Selected Articles & Essays
"Finding Hidden Women in the Feminist Narrative: Candie Carawan and Music in the Civil Rights Movement"
"Respectability, Prestige, and the Whiteness of Opera in American Popular Entertainment from 1890 to 1937"
"A New Performance for the New World: Carmen in America"
Collection awarded RMA/Cambridge University Press Outstanding Edited Collection Book Prize for 2021, Royal Musicological Association
"Blue Monday and New York Theatrical Aesthetics"
"Class, Race, and Uplift in the Opera House: The Theodore Drury Grand Opera Company Crosses the Color Line"
"'A Joyous Star-Spangled-Bannerism': Emma Juch, Opera in English Translation, and the American Cultural Landscape in the Gilded Age"
Teaching
I have spent thirty-four years as a college instructor in music departments and in the honors program at NC State University. Although I have now retired from full-time teaching, I'll always be interested in curriculum design and pedagogy.
I'm a workshop instructor for the American Musicological Society's summer institute on teaching American music history (August 2025), helping participants reconsider and reconceptualize how to present the rich tapestry of American music to their students.
I've taught and designed courses for music majors and general education students on American music, women and music, film music, African American music, music and politics, and western classical music. I've also designed honors-level seminars on music and political resistance (Music and Resistance), art by Black creators during the Civil Rights years (Arts in Dissent), and the circulation of and resistance to the Lost Cause historical myth in popular entertainment (Performing the Lost Cause).
Horace Maxile and I wrote a resource guide with lesson plans to help people who teach Western classical music include the music and the musical activities of women and people of color in their courses. Published by Routledge, Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher's Guide won the 2023 AMS Teaching Award for an Exceptional Pedagogical Resource from the American Musicological Society.
Activities
Podcasting
I've been one of the hosts of New Books in Music, part of the New Books Network since 2018. I've interviewed great authors including Naomi André, Brigid Cohen, Nina Eidsheim, Philip Ewell, Denise Von Glahn, Maureen Mahon, Katherine Preston, and Douglas Shadle. The books we talk about cover everything from Beethoven to Hip Hop, the "Star Spangled Banner" to the New World Symphony.
The New Books Network is one of the biggest public humanities projects in the world with over 27,000 podcasts on every topic imaginable.
Collaborations
I'm on the working team for the Black Opera Research Network (BORN), an international organization that explores opera both inside and outside of traditional operatic and scholarly institutions in the West. We seek to perform reparative work within the study and performance of opera by including the output of Black composers and librettists in the historical record.
I'm the leader of the Black Opera Critical Editions project and co-editor of BORN's quarterly newsletter. The first volume of the Journal of Black Opera and Music Theatre is due out in 2026.
Speaking
Recent presentations include:
- "The Plantation Show and Narratives of Racial Progress during the Gilded Age," North American Nineteenth Century Conference, Detroit, MI (June 2025)
- "Unruly Women and Respectable Ladies: Vocal Timbre and Stock Characters in Early Musical Comedies," Stage Struck! 6, Library of Congress (May 2025)
- "Fashioning a Theatrical Third Space: Chinese American Vaudevillians and the 'White' Voice," Society for American Music, Tacoma, WA (March 2025)
- "Homeopathic Opera: Uplift and Education in Vaudeville," American Musicological Society, Chicago, IL (November 2024)
Awards & Fellowships
Curriculum Vitae
Education
Ph.D. Musicology (2015)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dissertation: "Opera in English: Class and Culture in America, 1878–1910"
Winner, Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology
M.A. Musicology (2011)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Thesis: "Guy and Candie Carawan: Mediating the Music of the Civil Rights Movement"
M.A. Musicology (1991)
Eastman School of Music
B.M. Music Performance (1989)
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Magna cum laude
Academic Appointments
Lecturer, Musicology and Honors Program
North Carolina State University (2003–2025, retired)
Adjunct Faculty, Musicology
North Carolina Central University (2015–16)
Professional Activities
- Workshop Leader, American Musicological Society Summer Institute for Higher Education Faculty, American Music (2025)
- Area Co-Editor with Christopher Campo-Bowen, Nineteenth Century, Groves Music Online Gender & Sexuality Revision (2020–)
- Member, Black Opera Research Network Working Team (2020–)
- President, American Musicological Society, Southeast Chapter (2020–22)
- Member-at-Large, Board of Trustees, Society of American Music (2020–23)
- Host, New Books in Music, New Books Network (2018–present)
Professional Affiliations
- American Musicological Society
- Society for American Music
- Society for the History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era