Department of Music

Faculty & Staff Eileen M. Hayes Professor and Chair Office:   CA 3095A Phone:   410-704-2143 Fax:   410-704-2841 E-mail:   ehayes@towson.edu

Eileen M. Hayes joined the College of Fine Arts and Communication as Chair of the Department of Music in Fall 2012.

Hayes holds the Bachelor of Music from Temple University, the Master of Arts in Folklore from Indiana University, and the Ph.D. in Music from the University of Washington. An ethnomusicologist, her research interests include African American music, feminist theories, queer studies in music and the social sciences, and race in American popular culture. Professor Hayes pursues these interests in Songs in Black and Lavender: Race, Sexual Politics, and Women's Music (University of Illinois Press, 2010), a study that tracks the emergence of black feminist consciousness in women's music. The latter is a network that emerged from a subculture of lesbian feminism in the early 1970s. In spring 2011, Songs in Black and Lavender was nominated for the Gloria Anzualdua Award (NWSA) and the Lori Woods (AMA) awards. Hayes's writings appear in Ethnomusicology and Women and Music: the Journal of Gender and Culture. She is a contributor to Maultsby and Burnim's African American Music: An Introduction (Routledge, 2005). She has presented papers at numerous conferences including the Society for Ethnomusicology, the College Music Society, Feminist Theory and Music, the Society for American Music, meetings of the German Musicological Society, and the Center for Black Music Research. She is the co-editor with Linda Williams of Black Women and Music: More than the Blues (University of Illinois Press, 2007), nominated for the 2008 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize sponsored by the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH).

Hayes is a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. She is a member of the editorial advisory board of the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Eastman Rochester series for monographs in ethnomusicology, and the College Music Society monograph series. She serves as second Vice President on the Board of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Hayes is a past Co-Chair of SEM's Section on the Status of Women and a past co-chair of SEM's Gender and Sexualities Taskforce. In 2008, she co-founded the Southern Plains Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology, a regional chapter comprised of faculty and students in Texas and Oklahoma. In 2010, Hayes was the recipient of a DAAD Visiting Professorship fellowship. From April-July, 2010, she was on faculty at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where she taught three undergraduate courses in ethnomusicology and conducted preliminary research toward a project on blackness, national belonging, music, and reception in Germany. In summer 2011, Hayes conducted research toward her third book project. Her field study at the International Africa Festival, held in Wurzburg, reveals the combination of enthusiasm and ambivalence that attends the reception of Afro-pop in Germany. Hayes's research into the interactions of race, gender and sexuality in regard to African American music cultures is complemented by her personal and professional advocacy on behalf of women, people of color, and other underrepresented constituencies in departments and schools of music.