Sydney Boyd is a writer, teacher, scholar, and critic in Washington, D.C.
Before joining the NYU Washington, DC Global Academic Center as Assistant Director for Academic Affairs, she worked as an editor at the Federation of State Humanities Councils and as Adjunct Assistant Professor in Liberal Studies for NYU. As a scholar, she studies how music shapes narrative temporalities in twentieth-century literature stretching from E. M. Forster’s 1907 The Longest Journey to Robert Ashley’s 2011 opera-novel Quicksand. One of her essays, “The Color of Sound: Hearing Timbre in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,” is published in Arizona Quarterly. 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 has served on the Executive Committee for the MLA Forum on Opera and Musical Performance since 2019, 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.
Girl at the Opera 