Elizabeth Randell Upton

Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Elizabeth Randell Upton studies medieval music, both in its own time and as rediscovered and revived in succeeding centuries. Her work focuses primarily on song and the peculiar alchemy produced by combining words and music, particularly the cultural meaning song manufactures and encodes for both historical and modern listeners. Her Ph.D. dissertation (Chapel Hill, 2001) discussed the Chantilly codex (F-CH 564), the most important collection of late fourteenth-century chansons, and several of her essays on Chantilly topics are in press. She also has begun work on a new book about the chansons of Guillaume Dufay and 15th century fan culture. Her other major research interest is film music. Her recent work on music and Disney animation stems from her undergraduate class "Getting Medieval: Medievalism and Music in Popular Culture," in which Walt Disney and J. R. R. Tolkien stand together as the most influential figures interpreting and re-imagining European medieval material in the 20th century.