Olivia Bloechl

Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
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Olivia Bloechl specializes in European and North American music history from 1500-1800, with a focus on early colonial music cultures, baroque and classical opera, and French early music. She also publishes and teaches in the areas of postcolonial studies, early race, continental theory, historiography, and ethics. Reflecting these interests, her research is broadly concerned with problems of difference in musical life, particularly colonial and racial difference, as well as historical relationships between music and state politics.

Her first book, Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge University Press, 2008), traces the profound influence of early American colonization on American and European music history and makes the case for a postcolonial historiography of Western music.  Other projects include a co-edited volume of essays (with Jeffrey Kallberg and Melanie Lowe) entitled Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).  She is also completing a book on Opera and Politics in the Old Regime, which explores tragic opera’s involvement with state and interpersonal politics before the Revolution.  Research for Opera and Politics was supported in part by an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship awarded for 2008-2009 (http://www.acls.org/research/fellow.aspx?cid=6f32e9b1-ac16-dc11-9d54-000c2903e717).

In conjunction with this research she organized a conference on the Politics of French Baroque Opera in the Ancien Régime (February 27-28, 2009) at the UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies.  She has also co-organized (with Ingrid Monson and Sindhu Revuluri) an exploratory seminar on "Postcolonial Music Studies," which was hosted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Harvard University) in June, 2009.

Prof. Bloechl currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies in Musicology.  She regularly teaches the first-year graduate course on cultural and critical theory (200B), and has recently given graduate seminars on “Postcolonial Studies in Early Music” and “Tragic Opera from Monteverdi to Mozart.”  In Winter, 2011, she will offer a graduate seminar on “Ethics of Musicality.”  Undergraduate course topics include early European music, baroque opera, exoticism in Western music, and music and gender.

She is a member of the AMS Council and the Committee on Cultural Diversity, and is also a pianist and amateur harpsichordist.