Gillian M. Rodger

Education

• B.Ed. Music University of Melbourne 1989
• M.M. Ethnomusicology University of Wisconsin Madison 1992
• Ph.D. Ethnomusicology University of Pittsburgh 1998

Biography

Gillian M. Rodger is Chair of the Music Department and part of the Musicology and Ethnomusicology faculty. She trained in Music Education before completing a MM and a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology, focusing on issues of gender, sexuality and class in U.S. popular entertainment in the 19^th century. She has written two monographs, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima (University of Illinois Press, 2010) that explores the early history of variety theater (the form that preceded vaudeville) and its connections to other musical theater forms including minstrelsy and burlesque, and Just One of the Boys (University of Illinois Press, 2018), that considers male impersonation in the context of U.S. variety entertainment. She has also written about theater law and moral reform in New York State, showing the ways in which changes to theater law and the threat of police raids determined both the business practices of variety theaters and the kinds of acts that appeared on their stages, and about the ways that anxieties about class and decency shaped urban planning in the last third of the 19^th century.

Dr. Rodger’s work on popular culture extends to the late-twentieth century. She has examined the performance strategies employed by the Scottish singer Annie Lennox, arguing that this performer employs tactics not unlike those of nineteenth-century character singers in her approach to music, and through this performance provides an on-going and cutting critique of gender. She has written two articles that examine songs and music videos from the Eurythmics album Savage (1987) showing the way that Lennox opens up multiple meanings and subverts the expectations of the popular music industry, writing songs that savagely critique these expectations while still fulfilling their function as popular songs.

In her current work, Rodger is seeking to broaden the history of U.S. popular entertainment to link her earlier work on variety to the existing history of vaudeville, much of which was written in the last decades of the 20^th century. Rather than seeing this history as linear, she is arguing for a more complex narrative in which variety broadened seeking new audiences and forming a range of genres that are linked by performers, managers and support structures. Rodger is currently working on a book that considers the business practices of managers active in variety, vaudeville, burlesque, and other miscellaneous non-narrative popular theatrical forms. She is also working on a project centered on the music of Tony Pastor's theater.

In all of her work Rodger focuses on song and singing, and particularly on song as a dramatic moment. She argues that in non-narrative theater--that is, theater without a linking or overarching narrative structure--song functions to provide narrative periods in the performer’s act. Popular songs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relied heavily on stereotypical characters and scenarios and the skills of the performers were instrumental in bringing these songs to life.

At UWM, Dr. Rodger has taught a wide range of classes, from Bibliography and Research Methods for graduate students, to World Musics and the music history survey courses. Since moving into the role of department chair her teaching has centered on the first year foundations course and on courses for graduate students in the Music History degree.

Curriculum Vitae, CV (PDF)