# Kate van Orden Dwight P. Robinson, Jr. Professor of Music ![Kate van Orden](/sites/g/files/omnuum12086/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/2025-08/Kate%20van%20Orden.jpeg?itok=gKIzfCQf) location\_on Music Building 204S smartphone [617-495-3198](tel:617-495-3198) email laptop\_windows [Website](https://music.fas.harvard.edu/kate-van-orden) Office Hours: by appointment *On leave 2025-2026* 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 latest book 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. Photo credit: Ella Sophie Photography - ## Person Categories [Faculty](/person-categories/faculty)