Congratulations to Professor Emily Wilbourne (GC and Queens College) on the conferral of the Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award for her pathbreaking study, Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award

Emily Wilbourne

Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence (Oxford University Press, 2023).

“…Deeply interdisciplinary and beautifully written, Emily Wilbourne’s Voice, Slavery & Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence puts new historical subjects center stage during a key time and place in the development of European music. The book exemplifies old-fashioned archival digging applied to current and urgent questions. Building on intrepid research into the lived experience of enslaved and racially marked musicians and others in Florence, Wilbourne offers a trove of new evidence and draws confident and brave conclusions consistently informed by well-articulated appeals to a range of theoretical perspectives (including critical race theory). The resulting richly drawn, sonorous panorama of seventeenth-century Florence takes on foundational moments and sites for musicology and broadens to afford a critique of the history of our field. In her introduction, Wilbourne imagines the book as useful to a wide range of readers—from experts on the topic to those with no knowledge of music history to ‘others, unimagined at the point of writing.’ This is future-thinking scholarship that models the power of taking racial categories seriously for all historians of culture.”

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