About

Lily Kass is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator whose work focuses on the diverse ways in which operas are reimagined, adapted, and translated to meet the needs of new audiences. She earned an A.B. in Literature from Harvard University in 2010, and a PhD in Musicology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. Kass has taught for the Peabody at Homewood program since the Spring of 2018, and she began teaching at Peabody in the Fall of 2021. Her courses include 'Powerful Women in Opera,' 'Mozart’s Operas,' and 'Exoticism on the Musical Stage,' which seek to empower students to engage with the canon of Western Classical Music through research, analysis, and critique.

Research topics

• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Art
• History
• Business
• Literature

Selected publications

• Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus

  2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Literature
  • Philosophy

  A chapter-by-chapter explanation of the Book of Exodus, revealing its wisdom about nation building and people formation In this long-awaited follow-up to his 2003 book on Genesis, biblical scholar Leon Kass explores how Exodus raises and then answers the central political questions of what defines a nation and how a nation should govern itself. Considered by some the most important book in the Hebrew Bible, Exodus tells the story of the Jewish people from their enslavement in Egypt through their liberation under Moses's leadership to their covenantal founding at Sinai and the building of the Tabernacle. In Kass's analysis, these events begin the slow process of learning how to stop thinking like slaves and become an independent people. The Israelites ultimately found their nation on three elements: a shared narrative that instills empathy for the poor and the suffering, the uplifting rule of a moral law, and devotion to a higher common purpose. These elements, Kass argues, remain the essential principles for a liberal nation today

  Publisher

• THE ETHICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

  University of Notre Dame Press eBooks · 2020-10-31

  book-chapterOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Founding God’s Nation

  2020 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

• Founding God’s Nation

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020-12-01

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Organs for Sale?

  Vanderbilt University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  PublisherDOI

• 14 Ordinances for God’s New Nation: Justice and the Civil Law

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020-12-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 19 Beyond Animal Sacrifice: Human Art, Divine Rest

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020-12-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 18 “That I May Dwell Among Them”: God’s Prime Ministers and the Tent of Meeting

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020-12-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• THE ETHICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE

  University of Notre Dame Press eBooks · 2020-12-15

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• 15 Beyond Civil Law, Beyond Justice

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020-12-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jean Bethke Elshtain

  170 shared

• Richard Rorty

  170 shared

• Catherine Former

  Arizona State University

  169 shared

• On Voegelin's Calvin

  University of Virginia

  169 shared

• Philip Gleason

  169 shared

• Arlene W. Saxonhouse

  169 shared

• Kenneth R. Thompson

  Kentucky State University

  169 shared

• Edmund Randolph

  Arizona State University

  169 shared

Awards & honors

• Opera Philadelphia’s first Scholar in Residence (2021)