Graduate Student Kulkarni Wins Dissertation Fellowship

The American Musicological Society (AMS) is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2026–2027 academic year graduate research and dissertation fellowships. Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowships provide funding for the final year of Ph.D. dissertation work and are awarded on the basis of academic merit. Fellows receive a twelve-month stipend, currently set at $25,000. They may also elect to accept the award on a non-stipendiary basis (thus freeing scarce resources for others).

Proposed Dissertation Title: "The Empire Sings Back: Operatic Histories of British-Indian Colonial Encounter"

Anushka Kulkarni’s dissertation examines the history of opera as a dynamic site of British–Indian colonial encounter. Through analyzing the Bengali poet-composer Rabindranath Tagore’s musical dramas alongside the depiction of Indian colonial subjects in Handel’s opera seria, the dissertation illuminates the negotiations of colonial subjectivity through a wealth of nuanced and original research. Attending to the local creative reception of European operatic institutions, the project in turn demonstrates the malleability of the idea of opera itself as it assumed shifting meanings, functions, and political valences across colonial contexts. The committee was especially impressed by the project’s range of methodologies, archives, and musical repertoires, its global horizon for operatic imperial history, and its command of both postcolonial theory and opera studies.