Inna Naroditskaya, Guest Speaker

Inna Naroditskaya began her musical career as a performing pianist and musicologist in the former Soviet Union before immigrating to the US to complete her PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Michigan. As an ethnomusicologist, historian, and performer with professional and personal experiences worldwide, Naroditskaya is curious about and invested in a variety of scholarly inquiries.

Music and gender are major themes in Naroditskaya’s research. Her first book, Song from the Land of Fire: Azerbaijani Mugham in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods (2006) analyzes Azerbaijani music as an insight into the republic’s political transitions of the last hundred years. Her second book, Bewitching Russian Opera: The Empress from State to Stage (2012) explores Catherine II’s conspicuously “forgotten” operas, for which she is currently preparing the first annotated English translations.

Naroditskaya has presented nationally and internationally, recently at UC Berkeley, The University of Michigan, The University of Chicago, The Ethnology Institute in Osaka, and Hebrew University. She has served as a member of program committees for the International Council for Traditional Music and for the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Naroditskaya has received several rewarding fellowships, including a Rockefeller Bellagio Scholarly Residency, the Harvard University Davis Senior Fellowship, and a University of Michigan Rackham research grant. In addition to her scholarship, she has written articles and OpEds for The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, and Pacific Standard.

Naroditskaya’s teaching reflects her curiosity and appetite for exciting new explorations in her Northwestern University classes on Music and Islam, European pop culture, Russian Modernism, and others.