Faculty Search Updates
Martin Jean
The ISM is beginning a number of faculty searches this year. As you can imagine, hiring freezes due to the pandemic have delayed us, as have issues around ISM faculty governance and my own tenure as director. With these issues resolved, I write with updates.
Two positions are open jointly with the Yale Divinity School: one in Religion and Literature, and the other in Sacred Music Studies (music and religion). With both, we are showing special preference to candidates who work outside the western European canons. In the field of literature, this might yield someone working in African/African American, Latinx, or Indigenous literatures, for example, and with the music position, we will seek someone whose discipline will complement our current music faculty (Markus Rathey and Braxton Shelley.)
With the School of Music, we intend to hire at the senior level in organ, and have discerned this position to have capacity to bring on someone who can teach not only lessons to graduate organ majors, but also can teach more broadly in church music. In fact, we are especially keen to bring on someone who is not only an organist of international standing, but who has also run a major program in liturgical music, and may have additional skills in choral training or improvisation.
Our choral conducting area goes from strength to strength, this year with the largest number of applicants yet. Upon the retirement of Prof. Marguerite Brooks, Prof. Jeff Douma (director of the Yale Glee Club) has assumed the position of area coordinator and now teaches the senior graduate conducting majors. David Hill teaches the first-year majors. This month, we are beginning a search for the next conductor of the Yale Camerata and are thinking creatively about the remainder of this faculty member’s load. Rather than teaching the graduate majors, this person will be focused on an equally important need: giving instruction in choral conducting to non-majors. We are also exploring possibilities of directing some of this new colleague’s energies into New Haven itself, possibly through collaborations with the Music in Schools initiative in YSM. More details on this soon.