Sean Parr '99 awarded ACLS Fellowship for Residency

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) created the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowships for Recently Tenured Scholars to support scholars in the humanities and social sciences in the crucial years immediately following the granting of tenure, and to provide emerging leaders in their fields with the resources to pursue long-term, unusually ambitious projects. The 2020 cohort is the twenty-first and final for the program, which over the past two decades has supported nearly 275 scholars as they took up year-long residencies at independent research centers and universities.
 
The Burkhardt Fellowships are generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. They are named for the late Frederick Burkhardt, President Emeritus of ACLS, whose decades of work on The Correspondence of Charles Darwin constitute a signal example of dedication to a demanding and ambitious scholarly enterprise.

Parr's project, Singing at the Limits: Wagner, Breathing, and the Heroic Voice, situates the idea of heroic singing in the crucible of nineteenth-century vocal revolutions. Richard Wagner pushed singing to its limits in his vision of a German singing style as heightened speech. Whereas prior investigations of Wagnerian singing have typically centered on its sheer volume, this study examines how a school of singing defined by the disciplining of the breathing body has shaped the last century of Wagnerian singing. In approaching heroic singing from the perspective of breath, "Singing at the Limits" opens up a new avenue to understanding connections among voice, sound, and body, and, in so doing, upends the conventional notion that singers are defined by and as their voices.

Read more on the ACLS website.