Dr. Samantha Ege is an Anniversary Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. She was the Lord Crewe Junior Research Fellow in Music at Lincoln College, University of Oxford (2020-2022). She holds a PhD in Musicology from the University of York and a BA with honours in Music from the University of Bristol. She spent her second undergraduate year at McGill University as an exchange student. She taught music internationally for almost a decade after graduating from Bristol.
Dr. Ege is a leading interpreter and scholar of the African American composer Florence B. Price. Dr. Ege's publications and performances shed an important light on composers from underrepresented backgrounds. In 2023, she won the Society for American Music's Irving Lowens Article Award for “Chicago, the 'City We Love to Call Home!': Intersectionality, Narrativity, and Locale in the Music of Florence Beatrice Price and Theodora Sturkow Ryder” (American Music journal). In 2021, she received the American Musicological Society's Noah Greenberg Award for her Black Renaissance Woman album. In 2019, she received both the Society for American Music’s Eileen Southern Fellowship and a Newberry Library Short-Term Residential Fellowship for her work on women's contributions to concert life in interwar Chicago. Dr. Ege's first book is called South Side Impresarios: How Race Women Transformed Chicago's Classical Music Scene. It will be published with the University of Illinois Press in Autumn 2024.
As a concert pianist, Dr. Ege made her Barbican debut in 2021 with a "vivid, revelatory recital" (Michael Church, iNews) in which she gave the UK premiere of Vítězslava Kaprálová's Sonata Appassionata. In her London debut at the 2021 London Festival of American Music she gave the world premiere of Florence Price's complete Fantasie Nègre set. In 2018, she made her international lecture-recitalist debut at the Chicago Symphony Center with her event A Celebration of Women in Music: Composing the Black Chicago Renaissance. She has additionally presented her research and repertoire at a number of other institutions and venues in the UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Dr. Ege released her debut album in May 2018 called Four Women (Wave Theory Records). She released her critically acclaimed second album in March 2021 called Fantasie Nègre with Lorelt (Lontano Records Ltd.). Her third and fourth albums (both with Lorelt) came out in 2022: Black Renaissance Woman and Homage with the Castle of our Skins string quartet. Her next album highlights 19th and 20th century piano concertos by three prolific women, including Clara Schumann and Doreen Carwithen.
