Ellie Hisama came to Columbia in 2006, having previously taught at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where she was Director of the Institute for Studies in American Music. She has also taught at Harvard University, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Connecticut College, Ohio State University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Queens College/CUNY, and the University of Virginia. She is a member of the Theory and Historical Musicology areas.

Hisama is the author of Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (2001) and co-editor of Critical Minded: New Approaches to Hip Hop Studies (2005) and Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music (2007). She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, post-tonal theory, American music, popular music, gender and feminist studies, critical studies of music and race, and the social and political roles of music. Her work has been published in the journals Daedalus, Popular Music, Music Theory Online, Music Theory Spectrum, AVANT, Journal of Musicology, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and American Music Review; and in the edited volumes Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz Since 1945; Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music; and Locating East Asia in Western Art Music. She has received major fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation/Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and was an Associate at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke College.