Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden (Ph.D. Musicology, 2015) has received the American Musicological Society's 2023 Lewis Lockwood Award for an outstanding work of musicological scholarship (early stages) for her first book, From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Last summer, she received two awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities: the NEH-Hagley Fellowship on Business, Culture, and Society funded research at the Hagley Museum and Library and a NEH Summer Stipend supported research for a project on women's lives along trade routes from the East to West Indies.
Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden is a historian of eighteenth-century music cultures, particularly the French Revolution and musical labor since the Age of Revolutions (c. 1775–1848), and often draws on the fields of feminist musicology and historical sound studies. Much of her research is archival in nature. Through a wide lens, she examines the implications of music’s status as property under modern democracy and capitalism. Her first book, From Servant to Savant: Musical Privilege, Property, and the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2022), exposes the fundamental role that the French Revolution played in the emergence of modern professional musicianship and music historiography. This expertise extends into her newest research projects, which include crypto music, the global circulation of music through late eighteenth-century fashion magazines, and the musical diaspora of the French and Haitian revolutions.
