Karen Ahlquist - Department Chair
Musicology
ahlquist@gwu.edu
ext. 46270
Phillips Hall B-144A
Bachelor of Arts, 1970, Mount Holyoke College;
Master of Music, 1974, The Juilliard School;
Master of Arts, 1983, University of Connecticut;
Ph.D., 1991, The University of Michigan
Professor Karen Ahlquist began her musical career as a conductor. A native of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, she studied at Mount Holyoke College and The Juilliard School, where she won the Frank Damrosch Memorial Award in 1974. In the 1970s and 1980s, she conducted university, school, community, and professional ensembles in New York and New England and taught graduate conducting at the the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1992, her Ph.D. dissertation won the Horace H. Rackham Distinguished Dissertation Award from the University of Michigan.
Prof. Ahlquist has taught music history, literature, and ethnomusicology at The George Washington University since 1992. A student of music in nineteenth-century European and American culture, she has given papers for The American Musicological Society, The Society for Ethnomusicology, and The Society for American Music, along with organizations internationally. Her first book, Democracy at the Opera: Music, Theater, and Culture in New York City, 1815-1860, was prepared for publication under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and was published in 1997 by the University of Illinois Press. It was named a Choice outstanding academic book for 1998. Her second book, Chorus and Community, is an edited collection of essays of choruses and their music. It will be published by Illinois in 2006.
Prof. Ahlquist was founding reviews editor of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, has been a member of the American Musicological Society Council, was program chair for the Society for American Music 1998 national conference, and has published in the Journal of American History, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and the Journal of Musicological Research, among other publications. She has taught at the University of Michigan, Middlebury College, and Wesleyan University.