Danielle Fosler-Lussier is professor of music at The Ohio State University School of Music, where she has taught since 2003. She is an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society (2023).

She is serving as director of the Imagined Futures Graduate Professional Development Initiative of the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme. This initiative seeks to enact transformative change in the career-development support that Ohio State offers graduate students.

In all aspects of Dr. Fosler-Lussier’s work, she aims to make scholarship useful to broader constituencies. She is the principal investigator of the American Musicological Society’s NEH-funded Many Musics of America outreach project, which brings musicology into public spaces. She also serves on the Community Advisory Board of Path to Open, a pilot initiative of the ACLS that increases the reach of open-access scholarly publishing. 

Principal interests

• Professional development for graduate students in all disciplines
• Open access publishing
• Music in international contact and exchange
• The role of women in the creation of concert life, state support for the arts, and educational institutions;
• Musicology pedagogy

Education

• University of Pennsylvania (BA)
• University of Hamburg (DAAD scholar)
• University of California, Berkeley (MA, PhD)
• Princeton University, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (Cotsen-Behrman Postdoctoral Fellow)

Campus affiliations

• Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme
• Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies
• Mershon Center for International Security Studies

Books

Music on the Move (University of Michigan Press, 2020), an open-access book, is freely available. This book is accessible to general readers and covers key topics related to migration, mediation, and musical mashups. It was recognized with the AMS Teaching Award in 2021.

• A book talk about Music on the Move is accessible on YouTube.

Music Divided: Bartók's Legacy in Cold War Culture (University of California Press, 2007) explained the political pressures placed on musical style in the 1950s in Eastern and Western Europe and the United States.

Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy  (University of California Press, 2015) described musicians’ tours sponsored by the US State Department: these included rock ’n’ roll, bluegrass, blues, classical music and jazz. The latter book is accompanied by an online database of U.S. cultural presentations from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Other Projects (selected):

• Co-edited volume with William Cheng: A Cultural History of Western Music in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2023). Fosler-Lussier also authored the chapter “Politics: Music, Nation-States, and the ‘Small World’ in the Long 20th Century” that appears in this volume.

• On-camera interviewee for the film "What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat, and Tears?" (documentary film by John Scheinfeld). Fosler-Lussier was interviewed about the film for Rolling Stone magazine.

• "Music Pushed, Music Pulled: Cultural Diplomacy, Globalization and Imperialism," Diplomatic History 36, no. 1 (January 2012): 53–64
• "Cultural Diplomacy as Cultural Globalization: The University of Michigan Jazz Band in Latin America," Journal of the Society for American Music 4, no. 1 (February 2010): 59–93

Future Projects

Dr. Fosler-Lussier’s current research describes the interaction between government and civic groups in building musical internationalism and music institutions in the United States from the 1920s to the 1980s.