EMILY RICHMOND POLLOCK

Associate professor of Music and music historian

United States of America

Emily Richmond Pollock has been on the faculty of the Music and Theater Arts Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2012; she was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure in 2020. Pollock’s research focuses particularly on conservatism, the historicization of modernist musical value, operatic institutions, and the relationship between modern musical style and convention. Her first book, Opera after the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Other research on German opera has appeared in Twentieth-Century Music, Opera Quarterly, and the Journal of Musicology, as well as in the edited collections Dis|kontinuitäten (2025) and Dreams of Germany (2018). In 2019, she was awarded the Kurt Weill Prize for distinguished scholarship in music theater since 1900. Her current project, “Opera on Uncommon Ground,” is a fieldwork-based study of five American opera festivals.

CONTACT US: