Renee Norris

I have 27 years of teaching experience in higher education, creating and delivering courses in music history, first-year writing, and music courses for non-majors. I also have several years of administrative experience, including five as music department chair at LVC. From June 2021 to June 2022, I was Associate Provost of Graduate and Professional Studies at LVC and worked with a team of energetic and skilled administrators and program directors in support of all post-baccalaureate programs at LVC. My research area is blackface minstrelsy, and my current project is a book-length critical edition of mid-19th-century minstrel songs that parody opera.

Dr. Renee Norris, review, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States, by Matthew Morrison, University of California Press, 2024, Journal of Musicological Research.

Dr. Renee Lapp Norris, “Challenging Texts and a Transatlantic Blackface Minstrelsy,” Royal Musical Association Annual Conference, London, England, Sept. 2024.

Forthcoming: Opera Parody Songs of Blackface Minstrels, 1844-1860, a scholarly edition to be published in Music of the United States of America, a 40-volume edited series sponsored by the American Musicological Society and published by A-R Editions

Panelist, “MUSA Celebrates SAM,” 50th annual conference of the Society for American Music (SAM), Detroit, Mich., March 2024.

Review of The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy by Christopher J. Smith, and Ring Shout, Wheel About: The Racial Politics of Music and Dance in North American Slavery by Katrina Dyonne Thompson. Journal of the Society for American Music 11.4 (Fall 2017): 502-507.

The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd edition (Oxford University Press, 2013)
    biography: “Kavanaugh, Joseph,” “Kneass, Nelson,” and “Allen, William Francis”
    subject entry: “Minstrelsy” 

“Opera and the Mainstreaming of Blackface Minstrelsy,” Journal of the Society for American Music 1.3 (August 2007): 341-365.

Review of Women Performing Music: The Emergence of American Women as Instrumentalists and Conductors by Beth Abelson Macleod. Society for American Music Bulletin 27.3 (Fall 2001): 9.

“Two Parodies of French Opera Performed by Blackface Minstrels,” The Sonneck Society for American Music Bulletin 25.1 (Spring 1999): 9-11.

“Introducing George Crumb’s Five Pieces for Piano to Advanced Students,” Clavier 37.8 (October 1998): 22-26.

Review of Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, edited by Sheila Whiteley. American Music 16.4 (Winter 1998): 479-483.

Presented at the annual meetings of the Society for American Music (2010, 2006, 2000, 1999) the American Musicological Society (1998), the American Studies Association Middle Atlantic region (2005), the Antietam Early American Banjo Gathering (2013), and elsewhere.

Black Opera (University of Maryland dissertation, 2001)

• Music history courses for music majors
• Music-oriented courses in Constellation LVC (writing and intercultural competency)
• Integrative courses (ITG) in ConstellationLVC