Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of Music
Director of Graduate Studies
Historical Musicology
vanorden@fas.harvard.edu
Music Building 204 S
617-495-3198
Office Hours: by appointment
van Orden specializes in the cultural history of early modern France, Italy, and the Mediterranean, book history, and popular music (mostly 16th-c, but also in the 1960s). Her current project is Songs in Unexpected Places, on polyglot singing, cultural mobility, and foreign communities in Cinquecento Italy.
Her prize-winning publications include Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in 16th-c. Europe (Oxford, 2015), Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2005), and articles in Renaissance Quarterly and Early Music History. She won the 2023 Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for her chapter in Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, 1550–1800 (ed. van Orden, I Tatti Research Series 2), a volume of connected music histories working at the expanded scale of seas and oceans. Among her distinctions are a French Medaille d’Honneur for her outstanding contributions to our understanding of the Renaissance.
van Orden is the President of the International Musicological Society (2022–2027) and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Music. With Kay Kaufman Shelemay, she co-edits Musics in Motion, a book series devoted to music and migration in all times and places. She grew up playing bassoon on a sheep farm in Iowa and studied music in The Netherlands, where she began her career; you can hear her in concerts with period instrument bands and in recordings on Sony, Virgin Classics, and Harmonia Mundi.
Kate van Orden’s website can be found here.