James O’Leary

  • Frederick R. Selch Associate Professor of Musicology

Areas of Study

Education

  • PhD, Yale University
  • MA and MPhil, Yale University
  • MSt, Oxford University
  • BA, Williams College

Biography

James O’Leary specializes in popular music, musical theater, American modernism, and opera. He investigates the ways in which composers have strategically and self-consciously projected aesthetic hierarchies (high art versus popular, highbrow versus lowbrow) toward political, social, or cultural ends. He is currently writing a book about Stephen Sondheim’s collaboration with Arthur Laurents.

O’Leary’s research has been recognized by the John Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress, the Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American Music, the Transnational Opera Studies Conference Award for best paper, and Oberlin College Research Status. His teaching has been recognized with the Oberlin Excellence in Teaching Award (2026) and the Yale Prize Teaching Fellowship (2009).

At Oberlin, O’Leary has taught courses about the history of the Broadway musical, 19th- and 20th-century European American classical music, American popular and classical music from the 17th century to the present, and musical aesthetics. He has taught in the Oberlin First-Year Seminar Program (a class called Musical Snobbery) and Oberlin’s StudiOC integrative learning curriculum (a practicum course about the music theater of Kurt Weill). In addition, O’Leary launched Oberlin’s contemporary opera dramaturgy program.

O’Leary has been a regular lecturer for The Cleveland Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera, and has worked as a pianist, music director, and arranger for the Yale School of Drama, the American Repertory Theater Oberon Stage, and the Williamstown Theater Festival.

Fall 2025

Music of the Romantic Era — MUSY 255

Stephen Sondheim — MUSY 325

Spring 2026

The Broadway Musical — MUSY 138

Twentieth-Century Art Music Tradition — MUSY 276

  • The Middlebrow Musical: Between Opera and Broadway in 1940s America (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2025).
  • with Dominic McHugh, co-eds., The Cambridge Companion to Stephen Sondheim (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2027).
  • “Theatricalism: The Arthur Laurents Collaborations,” The Cambridge Companion to Stephen Sondheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2027), ca. 20 pp.
  • “‘If You Cain’t Fergit, Jist Don’t Try To,’ War, Reckoning, and Oklahoma! in 1943 and 2018,” forthcoming 2026.
  • “Elizabeth A. Wells, ed., Leonard Bernstein in Context” (review), Music and Letters (forthcoming).
  • “Breakout from the Asylum of Conformity: Sondheim, Laurents, and the Dramaturgy of Anyone Can Whistle,” Sondheim in Our Time and His, ed. W. Anthony Sheppard(New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 92–124.
  • “Bradley Rodgers, This Song is You” (review), Modern Drama 65 no. 1 (Spring 2022): 133–35.
  • “‘They Begat the Misbegotten GOP’: Finian's Rainbow and the US Civil Rights Movement," ed. Anne Martina and Julie Vatain, American Musicals Stage and Screen / L'écran et la scène (Paris: Sorbonne Université Presses, 2019), 145–161.
  • with Danielle Ward-Griffin, “Digging in Your Own Backyard: Archives in the Music History Classroom,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy, vol. 27, no. 2 (2017), 1–18.
  • “Keeping Faith with John Q. Public: Cole Porter, Billy Rose, and Seven Lively Arts,” A Cole Porter Companion, ed. Don Randel, Matthew Shaftel, Susan Forscher Weiss (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2016), 165–81.
  • “From Left to Gauche and ‘In Between’: The Politics of Voice in Duke Ellington’s Beggar’s Holiday (1946),” Sillages critiques, (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires Paris Sorbonne, 2016), 1–12.
  • “Se non è amore, è propaganda comunista: Finian’s Rainbow (1947) e il musical politico postbellico,” in Protest Music in the Twentieth Century, ed. Roberto Illiano, tr. Nicola Usula (Brepols, 2015), 67–78.
  • “Oklahoma!, ‘Lousy Publicity,’ and the Politics of Formal Integration in the American Musical Theater,” Journal of Musicology 31 / no. 1 (January 2014), 139–182.

  • CMUS 104: American Popular Music
  • CMUS 105: Musical Snobbery
  • MHST 221: American Music
  • MHST 238: Musical Theater from Berlin to Broadway: the Music of Kurt Weill (in conjunction with Oberlin’s StudiOC collaborative courses)
  • MHST 255: Romantic Music
  • MHST 275: Music Since 1914 (upcoming, Spring 2019)
  • MHST 321: Fin-de-siècle Music in Germany, Austria, and France, Oberlin Conservatory
  • MHST 334a: Music History and Material Culture
  • MHST 334b: Making American Music with the Frederick R. Selch Collection
  • MHST 336 / PHIL 231: Music and Philosophy
  • MHST 337a: Introduction to Organology (in conjunction with the Frederick R. Selch Collection)
  • MHST 337b: What’s That Sound? The History and Development of Instruments (in conjunction with the Frederick R. Selch Collection)
  • MHST 338: History of the Broadway Musical

  • Oberlin College Excellence in Teaching Award (2026)
  • Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American music (2022)
  • John W. Kluge Center Fellowship (2020)
  • Transnational Opera Scholarship Conference Award (Bern, Switzerland) (2017)
  • Research Status, Oberlin College and Conservatory (2015–2016)
  • Prize Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching, Yale University (2009)

Notes

James O'Leary Awarded Fellowship from Society for American Music

James O'Leary, Oberlin Conservatory’s Frederick R. Selch Associate Professor of Musicology has been awarded the 2022 Virgil Thomson Fellowship from the Society for American Music. This competitive award aids scholars whose research interest is focused on the history, creation, and analysis of American music on stage and screen, including opera. O’Leary will use the award to continue working on a book about Stephen Sondheim that he started during the pandemic. This summer, O’Leary will be speaking about Sondheim at the Transnational Opera Studies Conference in Bayreuth, Germany.

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