Music

Contact Details

Title	Lecturer
Address	Music University College Cork Cork Ireland
Telephone:	+353-21-490-3000
Email:	ei.ccu@dnomsed.k

Biography:

Karen's research focuses on the place of music within the history of ideas during the fourteenth century and on how writers on music negotiated a place for themselves and their subject within and alongside the fields of mathematics, for example, or the grammatical arts (grammar, rhetoric), or science, philosophy and theology. She completed her Ph.D. in musicology at New York University (May 2009; advisor, Edward Roesner). Karen's dissertation, entitled 'Behind the Mirror: Revealing the Contexts of Jacobus's Speculum musicae', addresses how and why concepts, controversies or advancements in other fields of intellectual inquiry influenced writings about music in the later Middle Ages. Her published articles (in the Journal of Musicology and the Journal of Plainsong and Medieval Music) include an analysis of the grammatical and rhetorical analogies present in Guido of Arezzo's Micrologus as they relate to performance practice, and a presentation of new biographical evidence she discovered about the activities of Jacobus in Liège. She is beginning research for a larger-scale project that examines the concepts of newness, innovation and modernity in fourteenth-century music, theory and science. Her other interests include the digital humanities: in particular, how the hypertexuality and intertextuality of medieval works may be analysed and represented in our modern hypertextual world. She is also interested in the topics of music and ritual in medieval Dublin; medieval Marian liturgies; and the analysis of expressivity in Schubert's songs.