Department of French and Italian

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century French musical cultures, nineteenth- and twentieth-century French medical and scientific cultures, French modernisms, trauma studies, sound studies, disability studies, gender & sexuality studies.

I am an assistant professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and affiliate faculty in the French/Francophone Studies Section of IU Bloomington’s Department of French and Italian.

My research has largely focused French music and culture and my interests in trauma studies, French modernism, affect and psychoanalytic theory, sound studies, and performance studies coalesce in my book Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the Wars, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. This book examines musicians’ personal materials in French and U.S. archives, as well as musical scores, recordings, and philosophical, medical, and military texts in order to offer a new vision of interwar French musical modernism as a set of musical practices that enabled consolation in the wake of World War I’s traumas. Resonant Recoveries is available open access thanks to an IU Presidential Arts & Humanities Production Grant.

My work on French music and culture has also appeared in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Transposition, Revue de musicologie and the volume Music and War in Europe from the French Revolution to WWI (ed., Étienne Jardin, Brepols, 2016). I also have an article forthcoming in Music & Letters, as well as a chapter appearing in Music and Death (ed., Wolfgang Marx), which is forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer. I am currently co-editing a special journal issue with Fanny Gribenski on music, sound, science, and power in France’s long nineteenth century.

I am currently working on two book projects that emerge from my work at the intersections of music studies, trauma studies, and intersectional gender and sexuality studies. French Musical Women, Politics, Trauma, and Technology in the Mid-20th-Century draws on archival research to explore how French musical women in popular and classical music spheres utilized music, sound, and technology as ways of negotiating loss, exile, and trauma as well as the national, global, and gender politics between 1930 and 1960. In my second current book project, On the Harm in Harmony: Abuse and Trauma in 20th- and 21st-Century US Musical Institutions, I turn to surveys, interviews, and archival research to investigate how and why abuse has taken place in popular and classical music institutions in the United States from approximately 1900 to present.

I am also a music and sound historian active in digital humanities. I am the creator of Sonic Constellations: Circulations of Music, Sound, and Emotion in Interwar France. After receiving an IU Institute of Digital Arts and Humanities, I worked with graduate students to populate two kinds of maps central to this project: 1) ArcGIS-created sound maps that show where and when different sounds and musical performance took place; and 2) social network maps that demonstrate social, emotional, and musical connections between artists, musicians, and writers in interwar France.