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Fellowships and awards: DAAD, NEH, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Professional societies: American Musicological Society, Society for Music Theory
Editorial Board memberships: JAMS (editor-in-chief, 1999-2001); Cambridge Opera Journal, WagnerSpectrum, The Wagner Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music Review

Scholarship:

• My Ph.D. thesis looked at the critical and philosophical-aesthetic contexts of Richard Wagner’s writings on music from the 1840s through the 1860s, in particular debates about the nature of musical “form” and “content” in so-called absolute music vs. program music and texted music (opera, music drama). These issues were the focus of my first book, Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Wagner and 19th-century opera studies have remained at the center of my work, with three edited volumes on Wagner: Cambridge Opera Handbook on Der fliegende Holländer (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Wagner (2008), and Wagner and his World (2009).

• Other long-standing research topics include Beethoven reception, Mendelssohn’s orchestral music, Wagner and anti-Semitism, Eduard Hanslick and the idea of “absolute music,” critical debates around the “New German School,” and Romantic music and visual culture.
• More recently I have been interested in music and theatrical melodrama, music and the “Gothic,” and the history of American musical theater.
• A current book project involves the idea of “beauty” in critical discourse on music from the Enlightenment to early modernism, starting from a new look at the Hanslick-Wagner controversy.

Teaching:

• My earlier teaching at èצӰ�� included, in addition to graduate history seminars, general education courses on Liszt and Romanticism, the symphony, Beethoven, and music appreciation, as well as beginning theory and graduate-level tonal analysis.
• Among the Freshman introductory seminars I have taught are Music 16N (Music, Myth, and Modernity: Wagner’s Ring cycle and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) and Music 34N (Performing America: The Broadway Musical).

• Graduate seminar topics include 19th century “neo-classicim,” music and visual culture, approaches to professional writing about music, eco-criticism and ideas of nature in Romantic music, and Mahler’s symphonies.