Elizabeth Wells

Elizabeth Wells is the Pickard-Bell Chair in Music and Head of the Music Department at Mount Allison University. Dr. Wells earned her Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Toronto with a concentration in the History and Literature of Music. She then pursued a career in public broadcasting, working as a music programmer and producer of a classical music programs for CJRT-FM in Toronto. In 1993, she entered the graduate program in musicology at the Eastman School of Music. Her dissertation, on West Side Story was supported by three dissertation fellowships, including the AMS-50 Dissertation Fellowship awarded annually to the most promising doctoral research in musicology in North America. In 2011 her book West Side Story: Perspectives on an American Musical was published by Scarecrow Press and won the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society. She is writing a second book on British musical theatre in the late 1950s.

Wells has read papers on musicology and music history pedagogy at national and international conferences, including meetings of Feminist Theory and Music, the American Musicological Society and the International Musicological Society. In addition, she has given guest lectures and has been an invited speaker on musical theatre, most notably at Harvard University, Catholic University, and the Eastman School of Music. She twice won the “Best Student Paper” from the New York State/St. Lawrence Chapter of the AMS. Her work has been published in Cambridge Opera Journal, the Journal of the American Musicological Society and Studies in Musical Theatre.

Before coming to Mount Allison, she taught music history at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, the State University of New York at Geneseo, and the Eastman School of Music. In 2008 she won the Tucker Teaching Award, Mount Allison’s highest recognition of teaching excellence, and the Association of Atlantic Universities’ Distinguished Teacher Award. She was named a 3M National Teaching Fellow in 2010. She currently serves as the Chair of the Council of 3M National Teaching Fellows. In 2013 she gave a TED talk entitled "To the Lighthouse" at Bishop's University.

Her research interests include music history pedagogy, British and American musical theatre at mid-century. She has developed innovative courses including one on the Beatles and a course supported by the Vice-President’s Curricular Innovation fund entitled “Music and Difference,” which addresses music’s role in mediating and expressing difference. She has been Head of the Music Department since 2008, and serves as the Secretary of Senate at Mount Allison University.