Biography

Imani Danielle Mosley is a musicologist, cultural historian, and digital humanist and technologist focusing on the works of Benjamin Britten as well as music, opera, and modernism in Britain post-1945. Dr. Mosley received her PhD from Duke University (2019, AM 2015) and her current research addresses sonic culture, acoustics, and ritual in the English churches and cathedrals central to Britten’s sacred music. She is affiliate faculty in the University of Florida's Center for European Studies. Currently, she serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of Musicological Research and College Music Symposium, is an Area Editor for Grove Music Online, and is a Member-at Large on the Council for the American Musicological Society and the Board Member for Musicology on the Board of Directors for the College Music Society.

In addition to her work on Britten, Dr. Mosley also specializes in contemporary opera, postwar studies, reception history, sound studies, queer theory, masculinities studies, and race in 21st-century popular musics. Her chapter "Say Her Name: Invocation, Remembrance, and Gendered Trauma in Black Lives Matter" (Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma) discusses how protest music written inspired by the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements reflect and re-present narratives around Black death-as-spectacle, intergenerational trauma, and hidden violence. Her contribution to the digital humanities focuses on sonic mapping, spatial humanities, data analysis, and digital and computational musicology. She serves on the board of the Sonic Dictionary project as an editorial metadata consultant and worked for National Public Radio as a music metadata analyst and librarian. Her digital humanities interests include studying algorithms related to music data, artificial intelligence, programmer bias and classical music, and music and digital ethics.

Prior to the University of Florida, Dr. Mosley taught at Wichita State University. She holds a MM in Musicology from the Peabody Conservatory (2010) as well as an MA in Historical Musicology from Columbia University (2013). Mosley is also an active performer, playing new music written for bassoon and baroque bassoon in various early-music ensembles. She is the director of the UF Baroque Ensemble, Lux Solaris. She received her BMus in Bassoon Performance from the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College-CUNY (2007) and a MM in Bassoon Performance from the Peabody Conservatory (2010). She is also a working dramaturg and librettist and has collaborated with composer Frances Pollock on the opera Stinney: an American Execution, premiered at the Prototype Festival in New York in 2019.