Anna Zayaruznaya

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Anna Zayaruznaya, of the Department of Music at Yale University, is interested in the cultural and compositional contexts of late-medieval song. Her forthcoming book, The Monstrous New Art: Form and Idea in the Late-Medieval Motet (Cambridge University Press), explores the roles played by monstrous and hybrid imagery in 14th-century musical aesthetics.

At Radcliffe, Zayaruznaya is studying Philippe de Vitry (1291–1369), a poet and composer well-known to music historians as a pioneer in the development of musical notation. Despite his importance, no large-scale study has been dedicated to Vitry. Zayaruznaya is laying the groundwork for such a study by examining Vitry’s world and works—musical and poetic—from a range of disciplinary perspectives. This entails a fresh look not only at thorny problems of motet dating and attribution, but also at the poetry Vitry did not set to music, his annotated collection of books, and his distinct and angry public persona. More broadly, Zayaruznaya is interested in exploring alternative models for writing about composers in cases where applying the “Life and Works” paradigm is either not possible or not fruitful.

Zayaruznaya received a PhD from Harvard University in 2010. She has been the recipient of an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society and a Van Courtlandt Elliott Prize from the Medieval Academy of America. Her work has appeared in the leading journals of her field, including the Journal of the American Musicological Society and the Journal of Musicology.