Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Nineteenth-century music criticism, Dance music, German nationalism, Isadora Duncan

About Me: I am interested in what music—especially when we dance to it, or when we don’t—has to tell us about our humanity. Tied to the concept of nation, these cultural practices become still more interesting. My dissertation (Disdain for Dance, Disdain for France: Choreophobia in German Musical Modernism, University of California, Davis, 2012) shows how German music critics from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries made intellectual concert listening, in rapt stillness, a hallmark of their national culture. I have two studies currently underway. A book project (Moving the National Body: Isadora Duncan and the German Public, 1902–1905) investigates how the American modern dancer Isadora Duncan’s tremendous popularity in Germany was politicized by a broad spectrum of cultural critics to shape public opinion during Imperial Germany’s transition to National Socialism. I am also studying the African-American Cakewalk as it was satirized in the popular German press at the turn of the century.

Recent Publications: “Selling Orchestral Music in the Vaudeville Age: The Duncan-Damrosch Tours, 1908–1911,” Journal of the Society for American Music 15/1 (February, 2021): 60–93.

“Dancing to Beethoven in Wilhelmine Germany: Isadora Duncan and her Critics,” Journal of Musicology 34/1 (Winter, 2017): 71–114.

“Dancing the Redemption of French Literature: Rivière, Mallarmé, and Le Sacre du printemps,” Dance Chronicle: Studies in Dance and the Related Arts 38/2 (2015): 134–160. [Awarded the 2016 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics, American Society for Aesthetics]

“Waltzing around the Musically Beautiful: Listening and Dancing in Hanslick’s Hierarchy of Musical Perception,” in Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression, edited by Nicole Grimes, Wolfgang Marx, and Siobhán Donovan, 108–131. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013.