Background

PhD, University of Chicago

Linda Phyllis Austern is a specialist in Western European, and especially English, music of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries. Her expertise includes the intersections between music and the visual arts, gender and sexuality, natural philosophy, and the Shakespearean theater. Her monographs include Both from the Ears and Mind: Thinking About Music in Early Modern England (2020) and Music in English Children's Drama of the Later Renaissance (1994). She has edited Music, Sensation, and Sensuality (2002), and co-edited Beyond Boundaries: Re-Thinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England (2017); Psalms in the Early Modern World (2011); and Music of the Sirens (with Inna Naroditskaya 2006).

Professor Austern's articles and reviews have appeared in collections of scholarly essays and such journals as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicological Research, The Journal of Musicology, Music and Letters, Modern Philology, The Musical Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, and Shakespeare Quarterly. Her research has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, British Academy, Newberry Library, The Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College (Harvard University), and National Endowment for the Humanities. She is presently finishing a monograph called Princess of Delights and Delight of Princes: Gendering Music in Early Modern England.

Professor Austern recently completed a term as vice-president of the North American British Music Studies Association. She also serves as Musical Advisor for the forthcoming Oxford University Press Complete Works of John Marston, is a member of the Advisory Committee for Seventeenth-Century Music for Grove Music Online/Oxford Music Online, and has previously served on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, Journal of the Royal Musical Association (International Advisory Panel), and Renaissance Quarterly.

Selected Works/Publications

BOOKS

[Most Recent Monograph]
Both from the Ears and Mind: Thinking About Music in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2020)

[Most Recent Edited Collection]
Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England, edited with Candace Bailey and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017)

ARTICLES

“Manipulating Music at the Court of Elizabeth I,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 142 (2017): 207-216

“Women’s Musical Voices in Sixteenth-Century England,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (2008): 127-152.

"The Siren, the Muse and the God of Love: Music and Gender in Seventeenth-Century English Emblem Books," The Journal of Musicological Research 18 (1999): 95-138.

"'For, Love's a Good Musician': Performance, Audition and Erotic Disorders in Early Modern Europe," The Musical Quarterly 82 (1998), pp. 614-653.

“Nature, Culture, Myth and the Musician in Early Modern England,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51 (1998): 1-47

"'The Conceit of the Minde': Music, Medicine, and Mental Process in Early Modern England," Irish Musical Studies 4.1 (1996): 133-151.

"'Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie': Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England," Music and Letters 74 (1993): 343-354.

"'Sing Againe Siren': The Female Musician and Sexual Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature," Reniassance Quarterly 42 (1989): 420-448.

BOOK CHAPTERS

“Music, Its Histories, and Shakespearean (Inter-)Theatricality in Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle,” in Bill Barclay and David Lindley, eds., Shakespeare, Music and Performance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 84-98.

“’Lo Here I Burn’: Musical Figurations and Fantasies of Male Desire in Early Modern England,” in Eroticism in Early Modern Music, ed. by Bonnie Blackburn and Laurie Stras (Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 175-202.

“’For Musicke is the Handmaid of the Lord’: Women, Psalms, and Domestic Music-Making in Early Modern England,” in Psalms in the Early Modern World, ed. Linda Phyllis Austern, Kari Boyd BcBride, and David L. Orvis (Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 77-114.

“Music on the Jacobean Stage,” in Thomas Middleton in Context, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 184-194.

“Portrait of the Artist as (Female) Musician,” in Thomasin LaMay, ed., Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies (Aldershot, Hants, England; and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005), pp. 15-62.

“’ ‘Tis Nature’s Voice’: Music, Scientific Inquiry, and the Hidden World in Seventeenth-Century Northern Europe,” in Suzannah Clark and Alexander Rehding, eds., Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 30-67.

"'All Things of this World, is but the Musicke of Inconstancie': Music, Materiality, and Spiritual Transcendence in Seventeenth-Century 'Vanitas' Imagery," in Katherine McIver, ed., Art and Music in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, Hants, England; and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003), pp. 287-332.

“’My Mother Musicke’: Early Modern Music and Fantasies of Embodiment,” in Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh, eds., Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregivers in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2000), pp. 239-281.

"'No Pill's Gonna Cure My Ill': Erotic Melancholy and Traditions of Musical Healing in the Modern West," in Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts, ed. by Penelope Gouk (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2000), pp. 113-36.

"'Foreign Conceits and Wand'ring Devices': The Erotic as Exotic," in The Exotic in Western Music, ed. by Jonathan Bellman (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), pp. 26-42.

News

Musicology PhD candidate named Northwestern Presidential Fellow

May 9, 2023

Linda Austern book wins Diana McVeagh Prize

November 24, 2021

Orfeo Goes Remote

September 17, 2020

Faculty artists release new works on page and stage this summer

July 13, 2020

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