Samantha Ege: "’She Proclaimed a Chicago Renaissance’: Race Women and the Black Chicago Renaissance”

Combining a mix of lecture and piano performance, Dr Samantha Ege delves into the ways that Chicago's early 20th-century Race women (i.e., Black women intellectuals and creatives committed to the entwined tasks of racial uplift and gendered progress) operated out of their South Side base and shaped a new vision for classical music that transformed the city and beyond.

Free and open to the public: no tickets or reservations needed.

Dr Samantha Ege is an Anniversary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. She was the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2020-2022). She holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of York and a BA with honors in Music from the University of Bristol. She spent her second undergraduate year at McGill University as an exchange student. She taught music internationally for almost a decade after graduating from Bristol.

Dr Ege is a leading interpreter and scholar of the African American composer Florence B. Price. Dr Ege's publications and performances shed an important light on composers from underrepresented backgrounds. In 2023, she won the Society for American Music's Irving Lowens Article Award for "Chicago, the 'City We Love to Call Home!': Intersectionality, Narrativity, and Locale in the Music of Florence Beatrice Price and Theodora Sturkow Ryder" (American Music journal). In 2021, she received the American Musicological Society's Noah Greenberg Award for her Black Renaissance Woman album. In 2019, she received both the Society for American Music's Eileen Southern Fellowship and a Newberry Library Short-Term Residential Fellowship for her work on women's contributions to concert life in interwar Chicago. Dr Ege's first book is called South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene. It will be published with the University of Illinois Press in Autumn 2024.