Biography
Anne Searcy researches the intersections of music, politics, and dance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her current book project is Choreographing Minimalism: Music, Neoliberalism, and the Creation of Contemporary Ballet, under contract with Oxford University Press. In this book, she explores how minimalist music helped create contemporary ballet in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and how in turn writing for dance shaped minimalist music. A selection of this research appeared as an article in Journal of the Society for American Music.
Searcy’s first book, Ballet in the Cold War: A Soviet-American Exchange, analyzes the American and Soviet cultural diplomacy programs, focusing on tours by the Bolshoi Ballet in the United States and by American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet in the Soviet Union. She has also published articles on the ballet Spartacus and the musical Hamilton.
As a teacher, Searcy leads courses on classical and popular music, including a nineteenth- and twentieth-century classical music survey, as well as courses on American musical theater, New York in the 1970s, Soviet music, Tchaikovsky’s ballets, and embodiment. As a pedagogue, Searcy focuses on using writing projects—broadly conceived—as a way of practicing thinking and communicating. She has recently been a member of the Writing Fellowship at the UW Center for Teaching and Learning.
Before coming to the University of Washington, she taught at the University of Miami.