Education
- Ph.D., History and Theory of Music, University of Chicago, 2001
- M.A., History and Theory of Music, University of Chicago, 1994
- A.B., Music and Chemistry, Duke University, 1990
Lynn M. Hooker is associate professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
From 2016 until coming to IU, she served as associate professor of music at Purdue University, where she was part of the team that inaugurated a bachelor’s degree in music program.
She studies music, identity, heritage, and markets in nineteenth- to twenty-first-century East-Central Europe, particularly in Hungary. Her book Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, IREX, Indiana University, and Purdue University. She has published on music and modernism, nationalism, race, and popular and folk culture, in (among other places) Musical Quarterly, Ethnomusicology, Anthropology of East Europe Review, The Cambridge Companion to Operetta, Twentieth-Century Music, and European Meetings in Ethnomusicology.
Since 2000, Hooker has conducted fieldwork in Europe and North America in Hungarian folk and popular music scenes, with a focus on Romani performers. Her current project uses oral history interviews and archival research to examine the transformation of Hungary’s “Gypsy music” industry since the early twentieth century; this book-in-progress is organized around the Rajkó Ensemble, which was founded in 1952 as the Romani band of Hungary’s League of Young Communists and continues to exist today despite many challenges.
After completing a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and spending two years on the faculty at the University of Richmond, Hooker came to Indiana University from 2003 to 2015 with an appointment in Hungarian Studies in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies (CEUS). During that time, she taught courses in CEUS in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology and in the Jacobs School Musicology Department, where she was a regular participant in the colloquium series and other departmental events.