Allison Chu is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music. Her primary research areas include American opera in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contemporary classical music, and musical manifestations of race and identity. Her current book project investigates how embracing the documentary impulse has transformed American opera in the twenty-first century, a trend she terms “documentary opera.” Contributing to opera, theater & performance, documentary, and critical race studies, her research illustrates how American documentary operas reimagine the art form for a twenty-first century American audience by challenging the opera’s long history of exclusion, racism, and inequity.

 

Chu’s research has been honored with the William F. Holmes/Frank D’Accone Dissertation Fellowship in Opera Studies from the American Musicological Society (AMS) and a P.E.O Scholar Award from the International Chapter of the P.E.O. Her work has also been supported by the Harold Powers World Travel Fund from the AMS, the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and the University of Michigan EXCEL Enterprise Fund. At Yale University, she was one of the founding members of the Grant Hagan Society, a graduate student-led affinity group that supports people of color in the Yale Department of Music, and a McDougal Graduate Teaching Fellow for the Yale Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning, leading workshops and trainings on equitable and innovative teaching. Other positions Chu has held include a research assistantship for the 2020–22 Mellon Sawyer Seminar at Yale, “The Order of Multitude: Atlas, Encyclopedia, Museum,” and an editorial assistantship for the University of Michigan Gershwin Initiative.

 

Chu is invested in bridging the gap between performers, scholars, and the public through her work as the co-founder of the Midnight Oil Collective, and current partner of MOC Innovations, a firm that reimagines how cultural assets are incubated and scaled into transmedia enterprises. She also writes for the Boston Lyric Opera.

 

Chu earned her Ph.D. in Music History at Yale University in 2025 and joined the Blair School in fall 2025. She also holds a M.Phil in Music History from Yale, a M.A. in Music History from Yale, a B.M. in Clarinet Performance with Highest Honors from University of Michigan, School of Music Theatre & Dance, and B.A. in English, with High Distinction from University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.