Academic interests
I joined the University of Oslo in October 2023 as a postdoctoral fellow in music and nature. I specialize in topics related to music and place, parks and gardens, and Vienna around 1900. My work combines historical and interpretive approaches and is inflected by cross-disciplinary interests in sound studies and visual culture, environmental history, and cultural geography. More broadly, my research interests include the energy humanities, ruin ecology, sensory studies, and modernism(s).
The working title of my primary postdoctoral research project is "Musical-Material Encounters With the Vienna Woods, c.1870-1920." I trace ideas about the Vienna Woods (Wienerwald) as generated and circulated in music, iconography, and popular discourse around 1900. I contextualize musical depictions of this landscape within several intersecting areas: changes to urban geography, the history of tourism, and the (literal) solidification of Vienna's reputation as Musikstadt. I combine archival research and historical contextualization with close reading and interpretive methods.
I am currently preparing a monograph titled Parks and Gardens in Viennese Musical Life and Imagination c. 1900, which reframes a history of music in turn-of-the-century Vienna through attention to urban green spaces as performance venues and as represented in music. I am also developing a secondary research specialty related to the ecological aesthetics of outdoor pianos as engaged in contemporary art and concert series'.
Beyond my work at IMV, I am the project lead on a collaborative junior research team funded by the Oslo Center for Environmental Humanities (OCEH) called Soundshed, and I am also a member of the Environmental Art Working Group at OCEH.
Courses taught
- MUS2651 Music and the Environment (IMV)
- MUS2001 Film music (IMV)
Education
- PhD, Historical Musicology, University of Toronto (2023)
- MA, Historical Musicology, University of Toronto (2017)
- BMus, Music History and Piano, McGill University (2015)
Fellowships
- Chancellor Jackman Graduate Fellow in the Humanities, Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto (2021-22)
Grants
- Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship--Doctoral, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2017-2020)
Awards
- Graduate Student Paper Prize, American Musicological Society New York State-St. Lawrence Chapter Meeting (April 2022)
- Junior Doctoral Fellow, Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto (2017-2022)
Research Talks and Conference Activity
- "Views from the Wienerwald and the Making of Vienna as 'Musikstadt'"
- "Traditions and Transformations in Hofmannsthal's Vienna." Study day, Magdalen College, Oxford University. April 2025.
- Royal Musical Association, Annual Meeting. September 2025.
- American Musicological Society, Annual Meeting. November 2025.
- “The Machine in the Garden: Contemporary Ecopoetics and Outdoor Pianos." Grounded symposium, University of Oslo. October 2024.
- “Pleasure Gardens, Audible Landscapes: Venedig in Wien and Schreker’s Elysium." American Musicological Society, Annual Meeting. Denver, CO. November 2023.
- "Franz Schreker's Der Geburtstag der Infantin at the Garden Theatre of Vienna's Kunstschau 1908." American Musicological Society, New York State-St. Lawrence Chapter. Rochester, NY. April 2022.
- "Acoustic Spaces in Schoenberg's Gardens." American Musicological Society, Annual Meeting. Virtual. November 2021.
- "Re-Hearing the Garden in Schoenberg's Erwartung." American Musicological Society, New York State-St. Lawrence Chapter. Virtual. April 2021.
- "Grappling with Beauty in Berg's Lulu." In "Roundtable: The Work of Beauty in Opera." Canadian University Music Society Conference. June 2019.