Introduction
Colleen Renihan is Acting Associate Dean, Teaching and Learning, in the Faculty of Arts and Science, where she provides leadership for curriculum development and renewal, quality assurance, assessment, and experiential and work-integrated learning. Her portfolio includes major faculty initiatives in interdisciplinary and AI-focused programming, international partnerships and articulation agreements, language education, and the expansion of work-integrated learning opportunities for Arts and Science students.
Dr. Renihan is Associate Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in the DAN School of Drama and Music. She served for several years as Chair of Undergraduate Studies in the School and has contributed to numerous committees and curricular initiatives at the departmental, faculty, and university levels. She is also Editor-in-Chief of Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music.
Colleen is an interdisciplinary musicologist whose research sits at the intersection of music, performance studies, health, and aging. Her work explores voice, gesture, memory, temporality, and the ways in which collaborative and accessible arts practices can support well-being, social connection, and expressions of selfhood among older adults, including those living with illness or disability. Working closely with healthcare and community partners, she leads interdisciplinary research-creation projects that bring together artists, scholars, students, clinicians, and older adults. Her research has been supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the New Frontiers in Research Fund, and the Ontario Early Researcher Awards program, among other provincial, federal, and institutional funders.
Her monograph, The Operatic Archive: American Opera as History, was published by Routledge in 2020. She is also co-editor, with John Spilker and Trudi Wright, of Sound Pedagogy: Radical Care in Music (University of Illinois Press, 2024). Her peer-reviewed work has appeared in leading journals and edited collections in musicology, opera and performance studies, and arts and health, including Twentieth-Century Music, Journal of the Society for American Music, Popular Music and Society, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Journal of Singing, University of Toronto Quarterly, Journal of Music, Health, and Wellbeing, and Wellbeing, Space and Society, as well as volumes published by Oxford University Press and the University of Michigan Press.