Ambre Dromgoole

Overview

Hailing from Nashville, TN, Ambre Dromgoole is an experienced music scholar, artist, curator, and consultant who specializes in subjects relating to music, religion, race, gender, performance, and popular culture, all of which she brings to her role as Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Music at Cornell University. Dr. Dromgoole received her B.A. in Religion and Musical Studies from Oberlin College and Conservatory, her M.A. from Yale Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music, and PhD from the Departments of African American Studies and Religious Studies at Yale University. Her current book project There’s a Heaven Somewhere: Sound and Sanctuary in the Lives of Gospel Blues Women documents a collective of twentieth century Black women sacred musicians whose transgressions led to innovations, which were bolstered and animated by their relationships with each other in and out of time and institutions. 

She has published and presented work for the Association of Black Women Historians, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Society for American Music, American Academy of Religion, and the Society for Ethnomusicology. She was awarded a Ford Dissertation Fellowship for the 2022-2023 academic year and has previously held fellowships with the Louisville Institute, Center for Lived Religion in the Digital Age at St. Louis University, the Sacred Writes project, and the Center for Material and Visual Cultures of Religion at Yale University. 

Dr. Dromgoole serves as Performance Review Editor for Ecumenica: Journal of Performance and Religion, sits on the board of the Journal of Africana Religions, and is a steering committee member for the Afro-American Religious History Unit of the American Academy of Religion. She frequently collaborates with the Forum for Theological Exploration and Cornell's Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures. Dr. Dromgoole strives to ensure that her work is accountable and accessible to her communities. In so doing, she has been featured as an expert scholar for the PBS series Ritual and in Religion News Service. Her writings can be found in Revealer Magazine and her voice can be heard on the Classical Ideas Podcast. Additionally, she has and continues to collaborate with both local and national organizations such as The United Methodist Church, Sound Diplomacy and the Center for Music Ecosystems, the National Museum of African American Music, and the Nashville Symphony. For the past several years she has collaborated with the Oral History of American Music Project (OHAM) and the Program for Music and the Black Church at Yale University to conduct in-depth interviews with luminaries of Black sacred music. Her interviews with the The Clark Sisters, Tramaine Hawkins, Bebe Winans, Richard Smallwood, and Kirk Franklin are featured in the OHAM archive. She is a board member for the Ithaca Social Service League and More Than A Walk, Inc. as well as the co-chair of the Oberlin Alumni Association of African Ancestry (OA4). 

In her spare time, Dr. Dromgoole enjoys reading, writing, boxing, auntie-ing, and performing around Ithaca with her band The Ambre Lynae Project.