Bio
Oja’s research focuses on American music and culture, with an emphasis on interracial history and social justice. Her most recent book, Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War (Oxford University Press) received the Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society. Her Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (OUP) won the Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music. Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century, co-edited with Charles Hiroshi Garrett, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press, and she is at work on a book provisionally titled Civil Rights in the Concert Hall: Marian Anderson and the Struggle Against Racial Segregation in Classical Music Performance. She is currently director of the humanities program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Oja co-directs the Eileen Southern initiative at Harvard, together with Christina Linklater (Keeper of the Isham Collection), which is dedicated to honoring the 50th anniversary of Southern's landmark book, The Music of Black Americans. In 2021-22, a digital exhibit about Southern is scheduled to open, and two webinars are planned: November 15, 2021, and April 7, 2022. Sign up for the November webinar at: https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2021-black-women-the-american-university-eileen-southern-one-virtual
Oja is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow at Harvard (2015-16), and a Visiting Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. She is past-president of the Society for American Music, past-chair of Harvard's Department of Music, and has twice chaired the Pulitzer Prize Committee in Music. She has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, American Council of Learned Societies, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Humanities Center, Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, Mellon Foundation, and National Endowment for the Humanities. She received the Everett S. Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award at Harvard; the 2015 Distinguished Service Award from the Society for American Music; and the President’s Distinguished Alumni Medal from the Graduate School of CUNY. She has served as the Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence with the New York Philharmonic and is an occasional contributor to TLS (London Times Literary Supplement).
Oja’s coauthored article "Marian Anderson's 1953 Concert Tour of Japan: A Transnational History," written with Katie Callam, Makiko Kimoto, and Misako Ohta and published in American Music (2019), won the Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music. She is part of the collective of scholars, performers, and educators who contribute to the blog "Women's Song Forum."
Her books include Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900-2000 (The Boydell Press), edited with Felix Meyer, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne Shreffler; and two chapters of Music and Musical Composition at the American Academy in Rome, edited by Martin Brody (University of Rochester). Also: Aaron Copland and His World (Princeton); Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds (Smithsonian); A Celebration of American Music: Words and Music in Honor of H. Wiley Hitchcock (University of Michigan); and American Music Recordings: A Discography of 20th-Century U.S. Composers (Institute for Studies in American Music). She has won three ASCAP-Deems Taylor Book Awards.
Oja co-directed (with Judith Clurman) the Harvard conference and festival Leonard Bernstein: Boston to Broadway (2006). One of her graduate seminars curated the exhibit, Unmasking Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in American Popular Culture, which drew on materials in the Harvard Theatre Collection. Another seminar initiated the Eileen Southern initiative. Oja is a member of Harvard's Standing Committee on the Graduate Program in American Studies, the Standing Committee for Theater, Dance, and Media, and the Steering Committee of the Charles Warren Center for American History.