August 16, 2024
This summer, Andrew Dell'Antonio has been active on several podcasts, discussing how educators can become more compassionate, caring, and effective. In July, he was featured on the ArtsAbly podcast, where he explored the importance of accessibility and disability in music education. Dell'Antonio shared how his teaching methods focus on expanding access and embracing the “access friction” created by the presence of people with a diversity of backgrounds and bodyminds in the classroom, through his personal solidarity with the experience of neurodivergent learning. He also discusses his work with Universal Design for Learning and how this influences equity and inclusion in music education.
In August, often referred to as Syllabi Month in academia, Dell'Antonio appeared on Butler’s BSOMBODY podcast. In the episode, he discusses his evolving approach to teaching and introduces a new initiative he's launching with E.G. Gionfriddo. Their project, Building Rigorously Compassionate Syllabi: Fostering Individual Accountability and Community Care, is based on the belief that both students and instructors value vulnerability, transparency, dedication, and flexibility from one another. The project emphasizes the importance of establishing and maintaining trust through diverse channels of communication between students and teachers.
Andrew Dell’Antonio specializes in the musical repertories of early modern Europe, particularly focusing on seventeenth-century Italy. His research encompasses musical historiography, reception history, and disability studies. Influenced by his personal experience with neurodivergence, he has recently shifted his focus to Universal Design for Learning and critical approaches addressing anti-racism, anti-ableism, and intersectional equity and inclusion in higher education music pedagogy.
Dell'Antonio blogs at The Avid Listener, co-authors the textbook The Enjoyment of Music, and co-edits the Music and Social Justice series for Michigan University Press. His monograph, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (University of California Press, 2011), explores musical styles and aesthetics in early seventeenth-century Italy, with a focus on the spiritual and gender implications of evolving listening practices. Earlier, he investigated contemporary popular music and postmodern critical perspectives, contributing to and editing the collection Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing (University of California Press, 2004). He has also published extensively in leading music and interdisciplinary journals, encyclopedias, and scholarly collections; further details are available on his professional site. https://www.adellantonio.com/
Professor Dell’Antonio served as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Fine Arts from 2012 to 2020. He has received numerous teaching accolades, including the inaugural University of Texas Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award (2009), the William David Blunk Professorship, and the Award for Distinction in Teaching from Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha of Texas Chapter. He is also a former Mellon Fellow at the Harvard-Villa I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy.