CONTRIBUTORS

Francesca Brittan is Associate Professor of Music and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz (Cambridge, 2017) and co-editor of Berlioz and His World (Chicago, 2024). She has published widely on topics at the intersection of sound, science, and medicine, most recently, “The Neural Orchestra: Cognitive Instrumentalities” in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2024). Her work has been recognized by a Junior Research Fellowship (University of Cambridge), a Senior Research Fellowship (University of Amsterdam), the W.P. Jones Presidential Faculty Development Award (CWRU), the Dimitrije Pivnicki Award in Neuro and Psychiatric History (McGill University), and the Alfred Einstein Award (American Musicological Society). She co-directs the Brain Media Lab at CWRU.

D. Graham Burnett is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University, where he is affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). He is the author of a number of books on technology, nature, and society from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Recent collaborative works include Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Crown, 2026); and Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses (Columbia, 2023), edited with Justin E. H. Smith. Burnett is associated with the ESTAR(SER) collective and was a 2023 visiting artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki.

Tony Day holds a PhD in Southeast Asian History from Cornell University (1981); has taught at the University of Sydney, Wesleyan University, and Yale-NUS College; and now lives in Graz, Austria, where he is working on a collection of translations and interpretations of the early nineteenth-century Javanese Sufi narrative poem Sĕrat Cĕnthini with Nancy Florida. His publications include Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia (2002); “Stepping on a Wulu: Minor Characters and Narrative Possibilities in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini,” in Ronit Ricci, ed., Storied Island: Explorations in Javanese Literature (2023); and with Nancy Florida, “A Sufi Traveler on the Road in Nineteenth-Century Java,” Philological Encounters 9, 1–2 (2024).

Céline Frigau Manning is a Professor of Italian and Performance Studies at Université Lyon 3, France, and an honorary member of the Institut universitaire de France. A graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, she was a researcher at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France from 2006 to 2010 and resident scholar at the Villa Medici in 2011. Her articles have appeared in English, French, and Italian, in 19th-Century Music, Opera Quarterly, and L’Avant-Scène Opéra. Her latest monograph, Ecstatic Sounds: Music, Hypnosis, and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, is forthcoming with The University of Chicago Press in the series New Material Histories of Music.

Ewan Jones is Associate Professor in English at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form (Cambridge, 2014), and The Turn of Rhythm: How Victorian Poetry Shaped a Concept (Virginia, 2023), along with numerous articles on poetics, intellectual history, and digital humanities. Close Reading as Attentional Practice, a series of essays co-edited with Marion Thain, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025.

Brian Kane is Professor of Music and Affiliated Faculty in Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He is the author of Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford, 2014) and Hearing Double: Jazz, Ontology, Auditory Culture (Oxford, 2024). His interdisciplinary work focuses on issues in sound studies, voice studies, jazz, and the philosophy of music.

Alexandra Kieffer is Associate Professor of Musicology at Rice University. Her work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century music and intellectual culture in France has appeared in 19th-Century Music, the Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music Theory Spectrum, and Ethnomusicology; and her book Debussy’s Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism appeared from Oxford University Press in 2019. Her current book project explores ideas about music, religion, and ritual in the social sciences in the twentieth century.

Youn Kim obtained her PhD from Columbia University and is currently Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include history of music theory, music psychology, and the interrelationship between music theory and the science of the mind. She has published in the Journal of Musicology, Psychology of Music, Journal of Musicological Research, and Musicae Scientiae, and co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Music and the Body (Oxford, 2019). Kim’s monograph Body and Force in Music (Routledge, 2022) was published as a part of SEMPRE Studies in the Psychology of Music, and she co-edited Music and the Cognitive Humanities (Oxford, in press).

Nicholas Mathew is Professor of Music and Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Political Beethoven (Cambridge, 2012) and The Haydn Economy (Chicago, 2022) and, as a pianist, has recorded the music of the Haitian diaspora in collaboration with Jean-Bernard Cerin and the Lisette Project.

Jacob Olley is Career Development Fellow in Music at Durham University, having previously held research posts at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Münster. His work has appeared in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and World of Music (new series). His article “Evliya’s Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court” (2023) won the American Musicological Society Alfred Einstein Award and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Early Career Prize.

Carmel Raz is an assistant professor of music at Cornell University. She is the author of Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford, 2025). Other projects include Sound and Sense in British Romanticism, co-edited with James Grande (Cambridge, 2023), which won the 2025 Diana McVeagh Prize for Best Book on British Music, and Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, co-edited with Thomas Christensen and Lester Zhuqing Hu, a digital collection of annotated primary sources which will be published by the University of Chicago’s online research and press service (CORPUS) in 2027. Her current book project explores theorizations of habit, automaticity, and attention in musical performance from antiquity to the present.

Benjamin Steege is Associate Professor of Music at Columbia University. His research centers on problems in the history of listening, intersections with the history of science, music phenomenology, as well as film music. He is the author of Helmholtz and the Modern Listener (Cambridge, 2012), An Unnatural Attitude: Phenomenology in Weimar Musical Thought (Chicago, 2021), and numerous articles. His research has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

David Trippett is Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ’s College. His research focuses on nineteenth-century intellectual history, Richard Wagner, and the role of sound within the history of science. He is author of Wagner’s Melodies (Cambridge, 2013), and co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture (Cambridge, 2019) and Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination (Cambridge, 2019), and Wagner in Context (Cambridge, 2024). Between 2015 and 2020 he was PI for a European Research Council Grant on “Sound and Materialism in the Nineteenth Century.” A monograph arising from this, Sound in Mind and Body, will center on composers and scientists embroiled in the nineteenth-century clash of idealism and materialism. In more hands-on work, he produced the first critical and performing editions of Liszt’s unfinished Italian opera Sardanapalo (1851/2018), which has now been performed in six countries. As pianist and conductor, he recently recorded his first three CDs of contemporary music with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Sarah Weiss is University Professor for the Institute for Ethnomusicology at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz (KUG). She is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in Southeast Asian performing cultures, gender studies, postcoloniality and hybridity, analysis of musical mode, and ritual studies. Among her publications are two monographs—Ritual Soundings: Women Performers and World Religions (Illinois, 2019) and Listening to an Earlier Java: Aesthetics, Gender, and the Music of Wayang in Central Java (KITLV, 2007)—several edited volumes including Is There Such a Thing as Singaporean Performance? (Shaker Verlag, 2023), and many articles. An active musician, Sarah Weiss is the artistic director for the university’s Central Javanese ensemble, Gamelan Nyai Rara Saraswati.

Richard David Williams is Reader (Associate Professor) in Music and South Asian Studies at SOAS University of London. A cultural historian of music, he is especially interested in literary engagements with music and sound in early modern and colonial north India. His first book, The Scattered Court: Hindustani Music in Colonial Bengal, was published with the University of Chicago Press in 2023. He is currently writing a book on the intellectual history of rāgamālā, the early modern north Indian art of imagining music through poetry and painting. His research primarily engages with musical archives in Brajbhasha (old Hindi), Bengali, and Urdu.