North Carolina Central University (NCCU) Music Professor Candace Bailey, Ph.D., has been named a fellow of the National Humanities Center.
Bailey was among 37 out of 647 applicants worldwide to be chosen for the 2019-2020 Walter Hines Page Fellowship, named for the late Cary, N.C., native who was an accomplished journalist, publisher and diplomat.
Bailey, a musicologist, will use the fellowship to spend a year at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park working on her book manuscript, “Women, Music, and the Performance of Gentility in the Mid-Nineteenth Century South.”
Her research focuses on women and music in the southern United States during the nineteenth century and keyboard music in England during the seventeenth century.
“Being a National Humanities Center Fellow affords me the time and space to engage with leading intellectuals from around the world to test my ideas and to respond to theirs. It is an ideal environment for further development and growth as a scholar, it is a life-changing opportunity,” Bailey says.
Bailey is also an NCCU-Duke University Franklin Humanities Institute Digital Humanities fellow. During her fellowship she introduced digital timelines and story maps into courses to engage more deeply with artists, composers and genres, particularly of African diasporic music.
Before joining NCCU in 1998, Bailey served numerous roles at Duke University, including as a visiting professor and scholar. She also has served as an associate professor at Louisburg College in Louisburg, N.C.
Among her prominent academic endeavors, Bailey received the 2016 National Endowment for the Humanities faculty award for her project examining music in the context of the lives of women who lived in the South between 1840 and 1870. She also received the American Antiquarian Society’s Kate Van Winkle Keller Fellowship for Research in Early American Music and Dance to engage in scholarly research and writing on American music.
She has published several literary works and articles. In 2018, she wrote “Charleston Belles Abroad: The Music Collections of Harriet Lowndes, Henrietta Aiken, and Louisa Rebecca McCord.”
Bailey obtained a bachelor’s degree in piano performance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She earned her master’s and doctoral degrees in musicology from Duke University.
The National Humanities Center is a private, incorporated institute for advanced study in the humanities. Since 1978, the center has awarded fellowships to more than 1,400 scholars whose work has resulted in the publication of nearly 1,600 books in all fields of humanistic study. The center also sponsors programs to strengthen the teaching of the humanities in secondary and higher education and to promote public understanding of, and advocacy for the humanities.
