I am a music historian and cultural theorist with wide-ranging interests clustered in the early modern period and the long eighteenth century (1500-1800). My research and teaching emphasize music/sound in French and British Atlantic empires, politics of French opera (especially the tragédie en musique), postcolonialism and decoloniality, global music historiography, and historical sound studies.
I am the author of Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008) and Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017), which was supported by an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship and a subvention from the James R. Anthony Endowment of the American Musicological Society. I also co-edited (with Melanie Lowe and Jeffrey Kallberg) Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015).
A co-founder of the AMS Global Music History Study Group (2019), I have organized or contributed to several essay collections emerging from the study group’s activities, including a colloquy on “Theorizing Global Music History” that I co-convened with Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2023). Currently, I am co-editing the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Music History (with Jessica Bissett Perea, Daniel F. Castro Pantoja, Hedy Law, and Juliana Pistorius), which brings together music and sound scholars, creative artists, and community activists whose chapters explore the potential for performing music history otherwise offered by a globally oriented perspective.
My current single-author book project, Music and Sound in the Struggle for the Upper Ohio River Valley, 1740-1783, returns to Indigenous North America and to the early Atlantic empires whose music colonialism I analyzed in my first book, Native American Song. In the current book, I turn to the later colonial period and to the role of musicking and sound epistemologies in the complex inter-imperial struggles over Indigenous territories surrounding the Allegheny/Ohio River, including the site of present-day Pittsburgh.
I regularly teach graduate seminars in Musicology and the “Introduction to Musicology” proseminar, and I teach undergraduate courses for the major/minor (MUSIC 0222), as well as general education courses, including two that I developed: MUSIC 0111 (“Experiencing Music History in Pittsburgh”) and MUSIC 0216 (“Global Music History”). I advise Ph.D. students working in my specialty areas and welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students.
I joined the Department of Music at the University of Pittsburgh in 2017, having previously taught at UCLA and Bucknell University. A classically trained pianist, I also enjoy dancing Argentinian tango and learning to play the lute and harpsichord.
Single-Author Books
Music and Sound in the Struggle for the Upper Ohio Valley, 1740-1783 (in progress)
Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France (University of Chicago Press, 2018)
Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
Edited Essay Collections, Colloquies, and Special Issues
The Oxford Handbook of Global Music History (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), ed. Jessica Bissett Perea, Daniel F. Castro Pantoja, Hedy Law, and Juliana Pistorius
“Colloquy: Theorizing Global Music History,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 73, no. 3 (2023): 832-72, co-convened Olivia Bloechl and Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang
Special issue: “Colonial Contrafaction,” Early Music, 47, no. 2 (2019): 145-98, guest ed. Olivia Bloechl
Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
“Introduction: The Discomfort of Entanglement in Global Music History,” Forum: “Centering Discomfort in Global Music History,” Journal of Musicology 40, no. 3 (2023): 249-55, forum ed. Hedy Law
“The Vulnerability of the Ear, or Listening with Levinas.” AILS Anthology/Cahiers d'Études lévinassiennes, 2023, https://www.ailevinas.com/anthology.
“Survivors’ Songs in Opera: What the Vulnerable Voice Can Do,” Women &Music 25 (2021): 33-54
“On Not Being Alone: Rousseauean Thoughts on a Relational Ethics of Music.” Colloquy: Rousseau in 2013: Afterthoughts on a Tercentenary, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66, no. 1 (2013): 261-266
“Choral Lament and the Politics of Public Mourning in the Tragédie en musique,” The Opera Quarterly 27, no. 4 (2011): 341-378
“War, Peace, and the Ballet in Le Soir,” Early Music 38, no. 1 (2010): 91-100
“The Pedagogy of Polyphony in Gabriel Sagard’s Histoire du Canada.” Journal of Musicology 22, no. 3 (2005): 365-411
“Orientalism and Hyperreality in ‘Desert Rose’.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 7, no. 2 (2005): 133-61
“Protestant Imperialism and the Representation of Native American Song,” The Musical Quarterly 87, no. 1 (2004): 44-86
Book Chapters and Editorials
“Song as Contested Worlding in Bougainville’s Journal de l’expédition d’Amérique (1756-58),” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Music History, forthcoming
“Sound Instruments in Indigenous-Colonial Fur Trading at Fort Pitt: The Pittsburgh Waste Book, 1759–60,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism, ed. Yvonne Liao, Erin Williams-Johnson, and Roe-Min Kok (Oxford University Press), forthcoming
“Gendered Geographies in Lully’s Proserpine (1680),” in Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Colonial Worlds, 1550-1800, ed. Kate van Orden, 253-75, I Tatti Research Series, vol. 2 (Officina Libraria/Harvard University Press, 2021)
“Listening as an Innu-French Contact Zone in the Jesuit Relations,” in Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity, ed. Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne Cusick, 13-36 (Open Book Publishers, 2021)
Editorial: “Global Histories of Early Modern Music,” guest editorial for Eighteenth-Century Music 17, no. 2 (2020): 173-76
“Music in the Early Colonial World,” in The Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music, ed. Iain Fenlon and Richard Weistrich, 128-62 (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
“Race, Empire, and Early Music,” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, 77-107
European and North American music, 1500-1800
Music in early modern Atlantic empires (French, British)
French opera and ballet, 1650-1800
Postcolonialism and decoloniality
Global music history and historiography
Historical sound studies
Music and politics