Colleen Renihan

Colleen Renihan is delighted to join the Department of Music at Mount Allison as Assistant Professor of Music for the 2012-13 academic year. Dr. Renihan completed a PhD in Musicology at the University of Toronto in 2011 with a dissertation entitled Sounding the Past: Canadian Opera as Historical Narrative, for which she received generous funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and for which she was a finalist for the Society for American Music’s Housewright Dissertation Award. Her research and teaching interests are focused in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and include Canadian music, opera, temporality, musical narrative, and the intersection of the philosophy of history and music. She has been the recipient of several awards and distinctions, including the University Gold Medal at the University of Manitoba. Dr. Renihan has presented her research at academic conferences in Canada, the United States, and England, including chapter and national meetings of the American Musicological Society, and in 2010, she participated in the Society for Music Theory’s graduate student workshop on ‘Music and Narrative’ with Michael Klein. She is a founding member of Operatics (a working group for the interdisciplinary study of opera), is a member of IPMC (Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Music in Canada), and has been involved with several research and writing projects at the Canadian Music Centre. A book chapter based on her dissertation research has recently been published in Opera Indigene, the first book in Ashgate Press’s Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera series. In 2010-11, Dr. Renihan taught courses in the Music History and Culture departments at Western University and the University of Toronto.

In addition to her work as a musicologist, she has appeared as a mezzo-soprano soloist with the Istanbul and Romanian Symphony Orchestras, Brampton Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Victoria Symphony Orchestra, Pacific Opera Victoria, the Banff Centre, and Toronto Bach Festival Choir & Orchestra, among others. In 2010 she appeared in the world premiere of R. Murray Schafer’s opera The Children’s Crusade as a part of Toronto’s Luminato festival, and sings regularly with Soundstreams’ contemporary music ensemble, Choir 21.