Kirsten Paige
Bio
I am an Assistant Teaching Professor of Musicology in the Department of Music at North Carolina State University. I also teach in the University Honors Program and am an NC State Impact Scholar. I am a member of the American Musicological Society’s Council and AMS Graduate Education Committee, the “Music & Nature” Study Group at the Gustav Mahler Centre (Innsbruck, Austria), and the “Music Studies in/and the Anthropocene” Research Network, which I founded in 2021.
Before joining the NC State faculty, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Music at Stanford University for three years (2018-21). I received my Ph.D. in Music History and Literature from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018, M.Phil. in Music from the University of Cambridge in 2012, and my A.B. in Music History and Theory from the University of Chicago in 2011.
My work explores how scientific — especially, environmental, energy, and climate — knowledge shaped musical and aural practices, technologies, and cultures in the long nineteenth century (and beyond), with special attention to global cultural and scientific exchanges. My research is deeply concerned with how music, sound, and their technologies fit into the matrix of modern crisis. In particular, I’m invested in questions of how musical and aural practices can participate in decolonial, collaborative approaches to studying or even counterpoising the Anthropocene’s human and non-human violences.
My essays on material, conceptual, and intellectual histories of music and the environment have appeared in journals including 19th-Century Music, the Cambridge Opera Journal, The Opera Quarterly, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Sound Studies, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. My book project, “Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology,” is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. The special issue of 19th-Century Music that I guest-edited and contributed an essay to, “Music and the Invention of Environment,” appeared in August 2021. New work is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, The Wagner Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Sound Studies, and The New York Times.
SHORT DESCRIPTION OF INTERESTS:
I would be interested in collaborating with scholars in any field on issues surrounding environmental history, arts, and literature, climate change, and sustainable technology and design.
https://ncsu.academia.edu/KirstenPaige
Publications
- Echo , SOUND STUDIES (2022)
- Listening to Climate Change , (2022)
- Listening to Daily Life in the Bosavi Rainforest , (2022)
- Introduction , NINETEENTH CENTURY MUSIC (2021)
- On the Politics of Performing Wagner Outdoors: Open-Air Opera, Gesamtkunstwerk and the Third Reich’s ‘Forest Opera’, 1933–45 , Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2021)
- Sonic ecosystems of loss: Voices of the Rainforest at twenty-five , Sound Studies (2021)
- Tectonic Microphonics , NINETEENTH CENTURY MUSIC (2021)
- Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music, by Holly Watkins , Journal of the American Musicological Society (2020)
- Opera’s Inconvenient Truths in the Anthropocene Age: CO2 and Anthropocene , The Opera Quarterly (2020)
- “Art and Climate” and the Atmospheric Politics of Wagnerian Theater , The Opera Quarterly (2019)