In India in the English Musical Imagination c. 1890-1939, A. Nalini Gwynne, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Music, explores the idea of cultural exchange within the British-India colonial encounter, with particular attention to the vast cultural debt to India owed by English music from the last period of empire. Gwynne’s study contests the accepted notion that the so-called English Musical Renaissance in the first half of the twentieth century was the work of English born and bred composers who fashioned an “authentic national style” by excavating indigenous folk song and Tudor traditions; she argues to the contrary that the early twentieth century was, for England, a period of growing national anxiety fueled both politically by its increasingly precarious imperial power and culturally by its lack of an arts music tradition and a native folklore. Empire compensated for a cultural void. A. Nalini Gwynne will hold an American Musicological Society Fellowship at the Townsend Center.