Bio
Erica Levenson researches music of the baroque era, with an emphasis on the transnational circulation of opera, popular songs, and musical theater. Her current book project, Playful Enemies: French Song, Satire, and Spectacle in Early Eighteenth-Century England, examines the history of British nationalism in opposition to London multiculturalism by attending to the lively presence of French musical comedies on the London stage during a period of political hostility between France and England. Following the cross-Channel movement of itinerant actors, ephemeral entertainments, and satirical tunes, the project addresses how local popular music traditions were transmitted and understood across borders in a world before modern forms of global interconnectedness.
An advocate of building collaborations across diverse intellectual communities, Levenson engages scholars in the disciplines of musicology, literary history, and theater history. She has presented her research at both national and international conferences, including the International Conference on Baroque Music, the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference, among others. She is currently on the Board of Directors for the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music.
Her articles on Anglo-French musical relations have been published in the journals Eighteenth-Century Music and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture as well as in the edited volume Music, Myth, and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Boydell and Brewer Press). Much of her research is archival-based and has been supported by the American Musicological Society Jan LaRue Travel Fund and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.
Levenson teaches courses on a wide range of topics, including histories of opera and musical theater, historical performance practice, musical borrowing, and music, gender, and sexuality. As a harpsichordist and organist, she values the integration of performance with teaching and research. She first pursued her interests in early music performance and interdisciplinary scholarship as an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley where she received a Bachelor of Arts in music and English literature. She holds a PhD in musicology from Cornell University and previously taught at the Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam.
