Emily Abrams Ansari, PhD is an associate professor of music history who focuses on 20th- and 21st-century art, popular, and folk music. She is also Assistant Dean of Research for the Don Wright Faculty of Music. She joined the faculty in 2007.

Before coming to Western, Ansari received a BA from Durham University and an MSt from Oxford University (both in the United Kingdom) and in 2010 gained her PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University.

Ansari’s research explores politics and identity as they pertain to music, and she has most recently focused on national identity and music, protest song, and music and feminism in the second half of the twentieth century. She has won a number of major prizes for her work, including the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award, the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, the Kurt Weill Prize, and the Society for American Music's Cambridge University Press Award. Many of her journal publications and book chapters and her first book, The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War (OUP, 2018), consider the effect of the Cold War on American classical music.

Ansari is currently participating in a collaborative, interdisciplinary, historical memory project, Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador, which seeks to document the experiences of subsistence farmers during that country's civil war in the 1980s. This project is funded by a $2.5 million SSHRC Partnership grant. As lead of the music team, she is working with students and collaborators to create a digital song archive, examine music at massacre commemorations and in Salvadoran educational settings, study individual wartime musicians, and facilitate historical memory workshops. Her team's overarching goal is to document music's social, psychological, and political functions during this conflict.

Ansari is also involved in several other projects. With Michael Sy Uy and Daniel Boomhower, she is co-editing a volume of essays on the history of music in Washington DC—the outgrowth of a symposium that happened at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC, in 2023. in Washington, DC. She has also recently embarked upon a study of Canadian minimalist composer Ann Southam. In 2021–23, she was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Society for American Music.