About

Sydney Boyd is a writer, teacher, and scholar in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

She manages the Cornell Council for the Arts as well as strategic initiatives and engagement in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University. Before joining Cornell, she served as Assistant Professor of Writing at Wells College, Assistant Director for Academic Affairs at the NYU Washington, DC Global Academic Center, as editor at the Federation of State Humanities Councils, and as Founding Faculty of English Literature at Bard DC. Her scholarly work studies cross-disciplinary artistic collaborations and how music shapes narrative temporalities in twentieth-century literature. She has published peer-reviewed articles in Arizona Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, and Public Humanities on cross-disciplinarity, twentieth-century literature, music, sound, and time. As a post-doctoral fellow at Rice University in 2019, she organized the first performance of John Luther Adams’ Inuksuit, an environmental work scored for between 9 and 99 percussionists, to feature a landscape installation created specifically for the piece. She served a five-year term on the MLA Forum Executive Committee on Opera and Musical Performance from 2019-2024, and she is the podcast host of Making Meaning: Why Humanities Matter.

As an arts critic, she has published articles on opera, Classical music, dance, visual art, and film for Houstonia Magazine, Houston Chronicle, Bachtrack, ArtsJournal, Arts + Culture Texas Magazine, and the Washington Classical Review. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in English from Rice University and degrees in music and English from the University of Idaho.