Yale News

In 2010, professor Gary Tomlinson left the University of Pennsylvania to join the faculty at Yale University. Eleven years later, he was appointed Sterling Professor of music and humanities, the highest honor bestowed upon a Yale faculty member. 

With his appointment in late October, Tomlinson is now part of a group of a few dozen Yale faculty. As a musicologist, he has spent much of the last decade researching and teaching music, human evolution and the humanities.

“It was a tremendously pleasant surprise that came along in the middle of the semester,” Tomlinson said. “It’s a tremendous honor, of course. I was very excited and very pleased.”

Tomlinson led the Whitney Humanities Center from 2012 to 2020. He said he initially found the job challenging, but quickly found that his position as director enabled him to get to know a broad range of faculty at Yale that he would not have been able to otherwise. 

During much of his time as director, Tomlinson served on the executive board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, a global institution which fosters collaboration between humanities centers at different universities.

“[There was] a lot of traveling in pre-pandemic days and meeting with humanists from many different nations,” Tomlinson said. “That was very exciting.”

Tomlinson recently finished writing “Meaning and the Machines of Evolution,” the third book in his series of publications about evolution and music. The previous two, “A Million Years of Music” and “Culture and the Course of Human Evolution,” were published in 2015 and 2018, respectively. 

For Tomlinson, his three most recent books represent an evolution in his academic career. Trained as a musicologist, Tomlinson studied how humans came to make music evolutionarily in his first book. This research led him to ask questions about the creation of culture and its relationship with evolution, leading to the second. In the third book, Tomlinson expands on his evolutionary research beyond humans into a broader biological perspective.

Tomlinson has taken an interdisciplinary approach since his first published book, “Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance,” which looked at Renaissance composer Claudio Monteverdi in a broad cultural context. Tomlinson’s interdisciplinary approach began with his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College, he said.

“I was a science major for a large portion of my undergraduate career before at the very end, I bagged it and became a music major,” Tomlinson said. “Indeed, it was evolution that I cared about at the time … in a certain sense I’m going back to that.”

Tomlinson affirmed the importance of dedication to interdisciplinary research, saying that humanists have to extensively research science before writing on it, and scientists have to extensively research culture before writing on it. He calls it a “two-way street.”

Gunter Wagner, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, has written a paper with Tomlinson and said he admires not just his expertise in multiple fields, but also his openness and honesty.

“What is also remarkable is his openness to criticism and the intellectual honesty in his responses,” Wagner wrote in an email to the News. “While he may in the end not agree with you, he always has a profoundly informed answer, and may even write another book if necessary.” 

Tomlinson will teach two undergraduate seminars in spring 2022: “Culture and Human Evolution” and “Nature and Human Nature.” The seminars fall under both the science and humanities subject areas, two of only four classes offered in the spring which do so.

Looking back on his career, Tomlinson said he is most proud of the place he has occupied at two universities: the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. He believes that he has “been in the conversation,” and has been able to make a positive impact on both undergraduate and graduate students. Tomlinson is also proud of his relationships with colleagues and what he has been able to learn from fellow professors throughout his career. 

Kathryn Lofton, who serves as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean of humanities, spoke highly of her experiences working alongside Tomlinson.

“To be in a room with Gary is to be with someone who thinks nothing is more important than the ideas under discussion,” Lofton wrote in an email to the News. “He pursues those ideas with a critical irreverence to every sacrality.”

The Sterling professorship is named after John William Sterling.