Education
Ph.D. Columbia University
M.M. Florida State University
B.A. Dartmouth College
Biography
Dr. Sean Parr is Professor of Music and Chair of the Fine Arts Department at Saint Anselm College, where he has taught since 2011. From 2022 to 2025, he held the Richard L. Bready Endowed Chair in Ethics, Economics, and the Common Good, a recognition that reflects the recent evolution of his scholarship toward questions of race, ethics, and the arts.
Dr. Parr's scholarly identity is rooted in both the archive and the concert hall. Trained as a lyric tenor and conductor as well as a musicologist, he has always understood performance and history as partners rather than separate pursuits, and that integration shapes both his research and his teaching. His work began with a focus on nineteenth-century French and Italian opera—on voice, gender, and the contributions of singers as creators of opera—and has expanded over time to encompass dance, technology, race, and ethics.
His first book, Vocal Virtuosity: The Origins of the Coloratura Soprano in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Oxford University Press, 2021), is the culmination of more than a decade of research. It examines how coloratura became an increasingly marked musical gesture with a specific dramaturgical function, and how it came to be gendered almost exclusively as the domain of the female singer. The book was awarded a subvention grant by the American Musicological Society, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and has received wide acclaim. Metropolitan Opera soprano Lisette Oropesa called it an essential resource that inspired her to explore new facets of her own singing. And scholars have praised it as a work that reclaims a space for coloratura sopranos in operatic history and offers masterful portraits of the prima donnas who shaped French operatic life.
His second book project, Singing at the Limits: Wagner, Race, and the Heroic Voice, grew from a DAAD-funded seminar at the University of Chicago and deepened during an American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship held in residence at Dartmouth College. The Burkhardt Fellowship, awarded to humanities scholars engaged in ambitious long-term projects of significant consequence, was pivotal in turning his attention to the intersection of Wagnerian ideology, voice, race, and ethics. That turn led directly to the Bready Chair, and to his co-organization of the conference Drawing the Line: Race, Gender, Ethics, and the Arts at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, from which an edited volume is now in development. His articles have appeared in the Cambridge Opera Journal, 19th-Century Music, Current Musicology, and edited volumes from Cambridge University Press and the University of Michigan Press, and he has presented his research at national meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, and institutions including Harvard, Columbia, and the Palm Beach Opera.
Dr. Parr has been deeply engaged in institutional leadership at Saint Anselm. He served as President of the Faculty Senate from 2022 to 2024, during which time the Senate developed or revised more than a dozen academic policies, approved eight new academic programs, and led working groups on a comprehensive revision of the college's core curriculum. He co-authored the proposal to establish a new School of Arts & Sciences and is currently contributing to policy development in preparation for a transition to a three-school structure. He also serves as the faculty representative on the Advancement Committee of the Board of Trustees. Beyond the college, he is an elected member of the Manchester Board of School Committee, where he has chaired the Education Legislation and Teaching & Learning Committees and has served on the Policy, Finance & Facilities, Athletics, and Student Conduct Committees, advocating for public education at the state level on behalf of a district serving approximately 12,000 students.
As a lyric tenor, Dr. Parr maintains an active performance career in opera and concert. He has performed operatic roles—ranging from the title role in Gounod’s Faust to Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème, and Tamino in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte—with Opera51, Raylynmor Opera, Eastern Festival Opera, the Natchez Festival of Music, Regina Opera, Brooklyn Repertory Opera, and the Amadeus Opernensemble in Salzburg, among others, and has appeared as tenor soloist in major choral works including Handel's Messiah, Mozart's Requiem, and Haydn's Nelson Mass. He also conducts Ensemble Ex Cathedra, which performs concerts annually at the Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Manchester, with recent programs including Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, Bach's Magnificat and Vivaldi's Gloria. He previously served as Interim Director of the College Choir at Saint Anselm, working closely with Campus Ministry on liturgy, sacred repertoire, and choral recruitment—experience that informs his ongoing engagement with Catholic musical life, as well as the College’s Sacred Music Minor and Certificate program he co-authored. He has also served as a professional cantor at the Cathedral of Saint Joseph since 2011.
Dr. Parr’s courses span music history, opera, theory, conducting, and performance. He has taught in Saint Anselm's core curriculum since his arrival and regularly incorporates live performance and experiential learning into his teaching. He established the Music Performance Program and the Common Hour Music Concert Series at the College. He lives in Manchester, with his wife, Karen, and their children, Tommy and Emily.