About Allison

Allison Chu is a music scholar, educator, and Ph.D. candidate in Music History at Yale University. Her primary research areas include American opera in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contemporary classical music, and representations of identity on and off the stage. Her dissertation project, titled "Documentary Opera: Archives, Identity, and Politics in Contemporary American Opera," traces the growing trend of incorporating documentary techniques, aesthetics, and source materials into contemporary opera creation since 2000. Intersecting opera studies, theater & performance studies, and documentary studies, her research illustrates how American documentary operas expand the genre’s representational capacities and challenge its history of exclusion, racism, and inequity. Her research has been supported by the William F. Holmes/Frank D’Accone Dissertation Fellowship in Opera Studies from the American Musicological Society (AMS) and a P.E.O Scholar Award, as well as with grants from the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM), the Yale Asian American Cultural Center Satoda Scholars program, and the University of Michigan EXCEL Enterprise Fund.

​Before coming to Yale, Allison received her Bachelor of Music in Clarinet Performance (2019) with highest honors and her Bachelor of English (2019) with high distinction from the University of Michigan. Allison has previously held positions with the University of Michigan Gershwin Initiative as an Editorial Assistant and the 2020-22 Mellon Sawyer Seminar at Yale, “The Order of Multitudes: Atlas, Encyclopedia, Museum.” Currently, Allison serves as a McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellow for the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, leading workshops and trainings on effective and innovative teaching, and she is one of the founding members of the Grant Hagan Society, a graduate student-led affinity group that supports people of color in the Yale Department of Music. 

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Allison is invested in bridging the gap between performers and scholars through guest lectures for the Connecticut SummerFest, writing for the Boston Lyric Opera, and as the Artistic Board President and co-founder of the Midnight Oil Collective.