Kristen M. Turner has been a lecturer at NC State University in the Performing Arts and Technology Department and the honors program for twenty years. She received her doctorate in musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015. Her dissertation, “Opera in English: Class and Culture in America, 1878–1910,” won a Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology. Her research centers on the intersection of music, identity, and politics in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and in the mid-twentieth century American Civil Rights Movement. Race and Gender in the Western Music History Survey: A Teacher’s Guide (Routledge, 2022) which she wrote with Horace Maxile, won the 2023 American Musicological Society Teaching Award for an Exceptional Pedagogical Resource. Her scholarly research has been published in a number of collected editions and scholarly journals including in Carmen Abroad edited by Clair Rowland and Richard Langham Smith (University of Cambridge Press, 2020), which won the RMA/Cambridge University Press Outstanding Edited Collection Book Prize for 2021 from the Royal Musicological Association. Her most recent publication is “Finding Hidden Women in the Feminist Narrative: Candie Carawan and Music in the Civil Rights Movement,” in Hidden Harmonies: Women and Music in Popular Entertainment (University Press of Mississippi, 2023). Working with Lucy Caplan, she co-edited a special issue on “The Arts in the Black Press During the Age of Jim Crow” for American Studies published in Fall 2020. Her work has also appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Musical Quarterly, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. Her first single-authored monograph, Singing Opera on Broadway During the Ragtime Era is under contract with the University of Illinois Press. Her research has been supported by grants from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Society for American Music, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Turner is a working team member of the Black Opera Research Network, which is an international group that promotes Black opera through scholarship and engagement with performers, composers, and the public. She is also active in professional musicological societies. She has been president of the American Musicological Society’s Southeast chapter (2020–2022) and a member-at-large of the Society for American Music’s Board of Trustees (2020–2023). She continues to work with both societies by serving on various committees. She has hosted “New Books in Music,” a podcast of the New Books Network since 2018. At NCSU, Turner teaches courses on Western classical music, women in music, American music, and film music, and honors seminars on the role of the arts in the Civil Rights Movement, perpetuating the Lost Cause historical myth, and resisting political oppression.