Gary Tomlinson

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Gary Alfred Tomlinson (born December 4, 1951) is an American musicologist and the John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and Humanities at Yale University. He was formerly the Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Ph.D., in 1979 with thesis titled ''Rinuccini, Peri, Monteverdi, and the humanist heritage of opera''.

Tomlinson became Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, in 2012.

Tomlinson's research has ranged across diverse fields, including the history of opera, early-modern European musical thought and practice, the musical cultures of indigenous American societies, and the philosophy of history and critical theory. His latest research concerns music, culture, and human evolution. Here he is concerned to reshape the relations of evolutionary theory, archaeology, and humanistic theory so as to offer a novel model of the emergence of human modernity. The chief ingredients of his model are the niche-construction theory of biologists' extended evolutionary synthesis, a growing systematization of culture evident in the archaeological record, and an extended semiotics indebted to Charles Sanders Peirce.