Denise Elif Gill, PhD, assistant professor of ethnomusicology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, was named a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Gill will finish her book titled “Melancholic Modalities: Affect and Contemporary Turkish Classical Musicians.”
“This project interrogates normative assumptions about melancholy through present-day musicians who champion, teach, and perform Turkish classical music, a genre substantially rooted in the musics of the Ottoman court and elite Mevlevi Sufi lodges,” according to the ACLS website.
The ACLS fellowships are intended as salary replacements to help scholars devote six to twelve continuous months to full-time research and writing. Accordingly, over the next year, Gill will travel to Turkey to continue her research on her second project, which will examine diverse forms of listening to and interpreting nonhuman sounds.
In her absence, Ruth Mueller, PhD, will be brought in for the year to teach Gill’s hugely popular course “Musics of the World.”