Holly Watkins

Holly Watkins received her PhD in musicology from the University of California, Berkeley, after completing an MA in musicology and a BA in physics at the University of Virginia.  Her book Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg was recently published in Cambridge University Press’s series New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism.  Her articles on Romantic and modernist aesthetics, ecocriticism, and the American symphonic pastoral have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music, and Current Musicology.  She has presented numerous papers at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the Look and Listen Festival in New York City.

In 2010-11, Watkins held a Harrington Faculty Fellowship at The University of Texas at Austin, and in summer 2010, she participated in the Mannes Institute on Musical Aesthetics in Chicago.  Her work has also been supported by the nationally competitive Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley, and Phi Beta Kappa.  Her current research and teaching interests include the aesthetics and philosophy of music, critical theory, ecocriticism, rock and alternative music from the 1970s onward, and gender studies.  In a former life, she enjoyed studying the principles of quantum theory and performing as the lead guitarist in an improvisational grunge-funk trio.