Kristy Swift named assistant professor of music studies at CCM

This is a new role for Swift, who has been serving as Associate Professor of Musicology – Educator at CCM since 2020. In 2024, Swift received a UC Faculty Excellence Award in Research, Teaching and Service sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Office of Research. Her research and teaching have been further supported by UC’s Office of Research, CCM Faculty Development Funding and CCMpower.

Swift’s research interests include activism, social justice and musicology; digital humanities; film music; historiography; identity and music; music history pedagogy; music of Cincinnati; public musicology; opera; and sound, music and trauma. Her forthcoming monographs are Thinking About Music History: Textbooks and the Canon (Clemson University Press) and Music History Resources (Routledge), and she is co-editing the collection Trauma-informed Pedagogy and the Post-secondary Music Class (Routledge) with Kimber Andrews, Associate Director of the UC Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning. Swift’s article and reviews are published in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of the American Musicological Society and Music Research Forum, and she is developing the digital research and teaching tool Music History Materials. Swift has presented her research nationally and internationally at meetings of the American Musicological Society; Lilly Conference on College Teaching, Music and the Moving Image; Society for American Music; Teaching Music History; Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives; and Sound and Music Through the Lens of Trauma conferences.

At CCM, Swift has created new courses including Activism, Social Justice and Musicology; American Opera/American History; Black Opera; Handel Renaissance; Opera and Disability; Protest(ed) Music; Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Divas and Divos; Sing Cincinnati; Sound, Music and Trauma; Copland, Verdi and Wagner; and she has taught core curriculum classes in the undergraduate music history sequence, opera history and style, and graduate research and writing.

Swift serves on leadership boards of professional music organizations: she is currently co-chair of the American Musicological Society Pedagogy Study Group and a member of the College Music Society Subcommittee for Scholarship, Research and Pedagogy. She has chaired the planning committee of the Teaching Music History Conference and served on the Society for American Music Education Committee. Swift has been a reviewer for the Journal of Music History Pedagogy and Music Research Forum.

As organ and piano soloist and accompanist, Swift has performed throughout the United States and currently serves as Director of Music at Newtown United Methodist Church where she was a member of the organ committee for the installation of M. P. Rathke Opus 8 pipe organ.

Swift earned a PhD in musicology from UC, a DMA in organ studying with Roberta Gary at CCM, an MM in organ studying with Willis Bodine at the University of Florida and a BME from the University of Florida.