Gary Tomlinson, Sterling Professor of Music and Humanities, is a musicologist long committed to multidisciplinary exploration, and his teaching, lecturing, and scholarship have ranged across a diverse set of interests. Central among these have been traditions of European classical music, including the history of opera and early modern musical thought and practice; but his essays and books embrace such other topics as the music of indigenous American societies, jazz, cultural and anthropological theory, the philosophy of history, affect theory, and human evolution.
He arrived at Yale in 2010 after many years as Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. At Yale he directed the Whitney Humanities Center from 2012 to 2020.