Dr. Paul Laird
Ph.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; M.A. The Ohio State University; B.M.E. The Ohio State University
Director of the Musicology Division from 2000 to 2009, Paul R. Laird has taught at the University of Kansas since 1994 after previous experience at Pennsylvania State University, Binghamton University, and University of Denver. He teaches courses on Baroque music, American music, and music of the twentieth century, in addition to more general music history classes. He holds a PhD in music from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include the Spanish and Latin American villancico, Leonard Bernstein, the American musical theater, and early string instruments. He is the author of Towards a History of the Spanish Villancico (Harmonie Park Press, 1997), Leonard Bernstein: A Guide to Research (Routledge, 2002), The Baroque Cello Revival: An Oral History (Scarecrow Press, 2004), Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms (College Music Society and Pendragon Press, 2010), Wicked: A Musical Biography (Scarecrow Press, 2011), and The Musical Theater of Stephen Schwartz: From Godspell to Wicked and Beyond (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), and is co-editor of Res musicae: Essays in Honor of James W. Pruett (Harmonie Park Press, 2001), On Bunker’s Hill: Essays in Honor of J. Bunker Clark (Harmonie Park Press, 2007), and The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (Cambridge University Press, 2002; 2nd edition, 2008). With William A. Everett, Laird wrote The Historical Dictionary of the Broadway Musical (Scarecrow, 2007) and they served as co-commissioning editors for musical theater for The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (2nd edition). Laird's articles and reviews have appeared in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (2ndedition), Anuario musical, Nassarre, Revista de Musicología, Early Music, Australian Journal of Musicology, CMS Symposium, MLA Notes, Historical Performance, American Music, American Record Guide, Continuo Magazine, Studies in Musical Theatre, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, and other journals, conference proceedings, published collections, and Festschrifts. Laird has presented papers and lectures at many conferences and universities in the United States and Europe. Laird directs the Instrumental Collegium Musicum and is active as a Baroque cellist. In August 2002, he won a University of Kansas W. T. Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence. His current projects include the intended publication of the orchestral score of the Broadway show Gypsy, a second edition of Leonard Bernstein: A Guide to Research (with Hsun Lin), a second edition of The Historical Dictionary of the Broadway Musical (with William A. Everett), and a third edition of The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (co-edited with William A. Everett). His teaching career has included four courses taught on music research for the Universidad de Cuenca in Ecuador.
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