Prof. Rebecca Cypess of Edison, a faculty member of the music department of the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, has been appointed to serve as associate dean for academic affairs at Mason Gross School of the Arts for a three-and-a-half-year renewable term.
Cypess has served as associate director of the music department for the last three years, in which capacity she has enhanced operational clarity; deepened the department’s commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion; worked tirelessly to improve departmental climate; and initiated collaborative projects across performance, research and teaching. She has also been a fierce advocate for students, helping to amplify their voices through the creation of a student advisory committee and addressing issues of concern with alacrity and compassion.
An accomplished scholar, harpsichordist and fortepianist, Cypess has pursued an interdisciplinary research agenda focused on European and American 17th- and 18th century music and performance practice as well as women in music and Jewish musical life. She is the author of “Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy” (University of Chicago Press, 2016); “Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment” (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2022); and over two dozen peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She is co-editor of the volumes “Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin” (University of Rochester Press, 2018) and:Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy: New Perspectives” (forthcoming from Indiana University Press in 2022).
Cypess is also well known in the Middlesex County Jewish community for taking on many leadership roles. She serves as co-chair of the Jewish faculty, administration and staff group at Rutgers-New Brunswick, is the secretary of the board of governors of the Rabbi Pesach Raymon Yeshiva in Edison, and is a founding member of the Middlesex Black-Jewish Coalition. She, her husband Rabbi Dr. Joshua Cypess (an independent consultant and researcher specializing in Jewish medical sociology), and their three children attend Congregation Ohr Torah in Edison.
Professor Cypess stated: “I’m honored and eager to foster arts education at a public research university. I see art as a response to the mandate for us all to respond to the work of Creation by being creative ourselves. In the words of Rabbi Chaim Brovender, ‘Art presents its own experience of the beauty of the creation as seen through the eyes of the artist, and, finally, through the eyes of the observer of the artist’s work.’ For Rabbi Brovender, the arts have the potential to lead to ahavat Hashem. In addition, I think they provide a path to heal relationships between people in a fractured world.”
By Harry Glazer
