I am a theorist and historian of music and culture with particular interests in affect theory, the history of music theory, Enlightenment aesthetics, early modern science, and eighteenth-century music. Currently I am Associate Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the music department at Wesleyan. My journal articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, Music Theory Spectrum, Eighteenth-Century Music, and the Journal of Music Theory. My first book, Beating Time and Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era, was published in the Oxford Studies in Music Theory series at Oxford University Press (2014) and won the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory. Last year I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the music department at Harvard, and next Spring I’ll be Visiting Associate Professor in the music department at Yale. I am a former junior fellow of the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, and I earned my PhD in music from the University of Pennsylvania.
Currently finishing a book project on affect theory titled Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical, which is now in production at Fordham University Press. In this book I place the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in the music theory of the eighteenth century. Because theorists in that period struggled to explain how music functioned as a sign, they began to propose an alternative, materialist theory of vibrational attunement in order to account for music’s affective power. Inflecting our current intellectual moment through eighteenth-century music theory and aesthetics, the book reveals formal aspects of historical and contemporary theories of affect. It sets forth a way of thinking through affect dialectically, drawing attention to patterns and problems in affect theory that we have been given to repeating. Finally, it argues for renewed attention to the objects that generate affects in subjects. During the 2016–2017 academic year I was extremely fortunate to hold an External Faculty Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center, where I began work on this new project.
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 film festival.
