Gary Alfred Tomlinson (born December 4, 1951) is an American musicologist and Sterling Professor of Music and Humanities at Yale University. He was formerly the Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.[1] 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 was Director of the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, from 2012 to 2020.[2]
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, the philosophy of history and critical theory, and evolutionary humanities. In his research on music, culture, and human evolution, 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. This work has broadened in two recent books to consider the evolution of human culture in general and the scope of culture and meaning among nonhuman animals. The chief ingredients of his evolutionary humanities are the niche-construction theory of biologists' extended evolutionary synthesis, a conception of culture wide enough to embrace complex behaviors of many animals, and an extended semiotics indebted to Charles Sanders Peirce.
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