Features
(Photo: Richard Baker)Growing up in Vienna, Austria, Kira Thurman taught herself to play the piano at age 4 and occasionally accompanied her mother—not always by choice—to the opera once she reached third grade.
By the time she graduated college in Ohio, the classically trained pianist had more than one professor privately encourage her to realize her potential. Now a PhD candidate studying German history, she ultimately wants to do the same for others as a college professor and, perhaps down the road, as a dean.
“I want to really plug myself into a community,” she explains. “It makes a difference having someone you respect and admire sit you down and tell you they believe in you.”
Thurman, who founded a weekly German conversation hour on campus and has finished a yearlong adjunct teaching gig at SUNY Geneseo, is heading to Germany as a Fulbright scholar to conduct research for her dissertation on the history of black classical musicians there. She has presented at several conferences, and has published pieces on German music and history, as well as on African Americans in classical music.
All the while, she has continued her formal study of musicology at the Eastman School.
“I am very much committed to living in both worlds, to being a musician and being a historian,” she says. “And the University of Rochester was the only place where I could do both well. Neither discipline would suffer. In fact, I was forced only to improve in both.”
