I am a music theorist and cultural historian with particular research interests in eighteenth-century music, affect theory, and the history of music theory. I am the author of two award-winning books, Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical and Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era. Currently I’m completing a new book on mission music in eighteenth-century Bolivia. I’ve published in a wide variety of venues including Critical Inquiry, Representations, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Spectrum, and the Journal of Music Theory. I received my PhD in music from the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to teaching at Wesleyan, I have also been Visiting Professor in the music departments at both Harvard and Yale, and have held fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center and in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows. I was recently named a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation. I am currently serving as Deputy Provost and Dean of Arts and Humanities at Wesleyan University.
In addition to my academic work, I have also collaborated on the creation of new and newly-imagined operas. Most recently I collaborated on an installation of The Magic Flute with Jonathan Berger, Susanne Sachsse, Vaginal Davis, and Jamie Stewart at NYU’s 80WSE gallery. Holland Cotter of The New York Times listed the piece among the “Best in Art of 2015.”
In 2014 I assisted in Bruce LaBruce’s film of Pierrot Lunaire, which won a Teddy Award at the Berlinale.