About

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

She is Assistant Professor of Writing at Wells College. Before joining Wells, she served as Assistant Director for Academic Affairs at the NYU Washington, DC Global Academic Center and as an editor at the Federation of State Humanities Councils. Her scholarly work 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 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.