Early Modern America

When I was writing my dissertation on 17^th-18^th-century American music at Harvard, I participated in an interdisciplinary writing workshop on early American history, had an American intellectual historian on my dissertation committee, and presented my work at a colloquium at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. As a musicologist, I encountered several practical challenges as I tried to make my work engaging to historians. Being conversant and up to date with an entirely separate body of secondary literature was an obvious but considerable hurdle. More fundamentally, however, my biggest challenge is framing my work so that it engages major questions that interest both musicologists and historians—which I am not yet sure is possible. This is especially pressing for my current project, which addresses the ongoing influence of British tastes on American musical life following the Revolution--a time period that has received abundant attention from historians, but which has been neglected by musicologists.