Gary Tomlinson is appointed the John Hay Whitney Professor

Gary Tomlinson, recently designated as the John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and the Humanities, is a musicologist and cultural theorist.

Tomlinson’s teaching and scholarship range across a diverse set of interests, including the history of opera, early-modern European musical thought and practice, the musical cultures of indigenous American societies, jazz and popular music, and critical theory and the philosophy of history. His latest project, intersecting with archaeology and evolutionary science, investigates the place of musical capacities in the emergence of modern humanity and expands on his Wort Lectures, titled “1,000,000 Years of Music,” delivered at the University of Cambridge in 2009.

His books include “Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance,” “Music in Renaissance Magic,” “Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera,” “The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact,” and “Music and Historical Critique.” He is the co-author, with Joseph Kerman, of the music appreciation textbook “Listen,” now in its seventh edition.

Tomlinson arrived at Yale in 2010 after many years as Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He has garnered honors and prizes from the Phi Beta Kappa Society, ASCAP, the American Musicological Society, the Modern Language Association, and the British Academy. Thomlinson is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships.