Dr Ege to write a book on Black women’s classical music-making in interwar Chicago

In the last of a series of book contract announcements, Dr Samantha Ege is pleased to announce that her monograph, titled South Side Impresarios: Race Women in the Realm of Music is under contract with the University of Illinois Press and will be published in 2024. Dr Ege’s expertise on the early twentieth-century African American composer Florence Price has led to her being contracted to co-author a biography on Florence Price for the Master Musicians Series (Oxford University Press) and to co-edit the Cambridge Companion to Florence Price (Cambridge University Press). Dr Ege’s solo-authored monograph with Illinois, however, has been years in the making. It is the culmination of archival work in Chicago and Arkansas across several years.

South Side Impresarios focuses on the community of Black female practitioners who operated on Chicago’s South Side in the first half of the twentieth century. Dr Ege illuminates their unacknowledged activity and ambition and sheds new light on concert culture in interwar Chicago.

Samantha Ege is the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College. She is the recipient of a Newberry Library Short-Term Residential Fellowship (2019) and the Society for American Music’s Eileen Southern Fellowship (2019) for her work on women’s contributions to concert life in interwar Chicago. Her research has been published in American Music, Women and Music, and the Kapralova Society Journal. Her latest album (released on LORELT) is called Fantasie Nègre: The Piano Music of Florence Price.