Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden
Associate Professor of Music History, University of North Texas
Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden (Ph.D. Musicology, 2015) is a historian of eighteenth-century music cultures whose work explores the intersections of music, labor, and politics during the Age of Revolutions. Her book From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2022) received the American Musicological Society’s 2023 Lewis Lockwood Award for an outstanding work of musicological scholarship in its early stages.
Her research draws on feminist musicology and historical sound studies and frequently involves extensive archival work. Through this lens, she examines the implications of music’s status as property within modern democracy and capitalism. In 2023 she received two awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities: an NEH-Hagley Fellowship on Business, Culture, and Society, supporting research at the Hagley Museum and Library, and an NEH Summer Stipend for a project on women’s lives along trade routes connecting the East and West Indies. Her current research projects explore topics including crypto music, the global circulation of music through eighteenth-century fashion magazines, and the musical diaspora of the French and Haitian Revolutions.
