Ayana O. Smith

Ayana O. Smith serves as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Research, and Creative Activity and Professor of Musicology at Indiana University's Jacobs School of Music, where she also affiliates with IU Renaissance Studies. She manages tenure and promotion processes, develops faculty policies, and advances research initiatives across the institution.

Her academic credentials include:

• B.A. in Latin and Music, Swarthmore College (1995)
• M.A. in Music History, Yale University (2001)
• Ph.D. in Music History, Yale University (2001)

Smith's research employs interdisciplinary frameworks examining seventeenth-century Italian opera and African American music through intertextual lenses. Her 2024 monograph Inclusive Music Histories: Leading Change through Research and Pedagogy pioneers methodologies for diversifying musicological narratives, while her 2019 work Dreaming with Open Eyes: Opera, Aesthetics, and Perception in Arcadian Rome analyzes Baroque sensory culture through historical performance practices.

Her scholarly recognition includes:

• Mellon Foundation Fellowship
• Social Science Research Council Fellowship
• Institute for Citizens & Scholars Fellowship
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
• Residential Fellowship at Columbia University's Italian Academy (2022)

Smith actively shapes academic discourse through leadership roles including board membership with the American Handel Society and editorial contributions to Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, following prior service as Vice President of the Society of Seventeenth-Century Music and Council member of the American Musicological Society.