Zac Stewart

Zac Stewart, a Ph.D. candidate in music history, studies French music-making between 1940 and 1966, exploring how non-avant-garde operas engaged with contemporaneous events and political issues. His dissertation examines how French listeners used operas, often on historical subjects, to process the violence of the German occupation, the flourishing of authoritarian and conservative politics, postwar entanglements in colonial Indochina and Algeria, and Franco-German rapprochement. Through these operas he considers the role of music in mediating between collective historical memories, and contemporary politics and identities.

In 2021-2022 Zac conducted archival research in Paris, funded by a Georges Lurcy Fellowship and as a visiting scholar (pensionnaire étranger) at the École normale supérieure. In 2020 he received an M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet Research Grant from the American Musicological Society. Recent papers stemming from his dissertation include “Darius Milhaud, Simón Bolívar, and Hugo Chávez,” and “Processing Trauma in Poulenc’s ‘Dialogues des Carmélites,’” the latter presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the AMS.