Holly Watkins
Professor of Musicology
Chair, Musicology Department
Minehan Family Professor
Affiliate Faculty, Theory
BIOGRAPHY
Holly Watkins received her PhD in musicology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004, after completing an MA in musicology and a BA in physics at the University of Virginia. She is the author ofΒ Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetic of MusicΒ (Chicago, 2018) andΒ Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought : From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold SchoenbergΒ (Cambridge, 2011). Her articles on Romantic and modernist aesthetics, music and embodiment, and intersections between music, philosophy, and ecology have appeared in such venues as theΒ Journal of the American Musicological Society, Nineteenth-Century Music, New Literary History, Women and Music, Opera Quarterly,Β New Centennial Review, andΒ Contemporary Music Review. She has presented numerous papers at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society as well as conferences ranging from the conventions of the Modern Language Association and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music to meetings of the Music Theory Society of New York State and the Look and Listen Festival in New York City.
In 2014-15, Watkins received a Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to support the writing ofΒ Musical Vitalities,Β and in 2010-11, she held a Harrington Faculty Fellowship at The University of Texas at Austin. In summer 2010, she participated in the Mannes Institute on Musical Aesthetics in Chicago. Her work has also been funded 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 research and teaching interests center on Romanticism, the philosophy of music, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Austro-German music, and connections between human and animal sound-making. In a former life, she preferred studying the principles of quantum theory and performing as the lead guitarist in an improvisational grunge-funk trio. Currently, she is an avid gardener and enjoys hiking in New York and her home state of West Virginia.
WORKS AND PUBLICATIONS
Books
Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetic of MusicΒ (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold SchoenbergΒ (Cambridge, 2011).
Articles
βMusic and Romantic Interiority,β in The Cambridge Companion to Music and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
βRomantic Musical Aesthetics and the Transmigration of Soul,β New Literary History 49, no. 4 (2018): 579-96; special fiftieth-anniversary issue on βRomanticism, Now and Then.β Find itΒ here
βOn Not Letting Sounds Be Themselves,β The New Centennial Review 18, no. 2 (2018): 75-98; special issue on Music & Theory: New Ontologies, Politics, and Materialities. Find itΒ here
βToward a Post-Humanist Organicism,β Nineteenth-Century Music Review 14, no. 1 (2017); special issue on music and networks.
βDown with Disembodiment, or, Musicology and the Material Turn,β co-authored with Melina Esse, Women and Music 19 (2015): 160-68; special issue in honor of Suzanne Cusick.
βThe Music Friend,βΒ Opera QuarterlyΒ 31, nos. 1-2 (2015): 145-49
βMusic Between Reaction and Response,βΒ Evental AestheticsΒ 2, no. 2 (2013): 78-97, special issue on art and animals.
βSlavoj Ε½iΕΎek: Responding from the Void,βΒ Contemporary Music ReviewΒ 31, nos. 5-6 (2012), special issue on music and philosophy.
βThe Floral Poetics of SchumannβsΒ BlumenstΓΌck, op. 19,βΒ 19th-Century MusicΒ 36, no. 1 (2012): 24-45.
βMusical Ecologies of Place and Placelessness,β contribution to colloquy entitled βEcomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology,βΒ Journal of the American Musicological SocietyΒ 64, no. 2 (2011): 404-08.
βSchoenbergβs Interior Designs,βΒ Journal of the American Musicological SocietyΒ 61, no. 1 (2008): 123-206.
βThe Pastoral After Environmentalism: Nature and Culture in Stephen Albertβs Symphony: RiverRun,βΒ Current MusicologyΒ 84 (2007): 7-24.
βFrom the Mine to the Shrine: The Critical Origins of Musical Depth,βΒ 19th-Century MusicΒ 27, no. 3 (2004): 179-207.
Reviews
Lawrence Dreyfus,Β Wagner and the Erotic ImpulseΒ (Harvard University Press, 2010).Women and MusicΒ 16 (2012).
Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Oxford University Press, 2007).  Austrian History Yearbook 43 (2012).
Musical Meaning and Human Values, edited by Lawrence Kramer and Keith Chapin (Fordham University Press, 2009).Β Β Music AnalysisΒ 31, no. 2 (2012).
MUSICOLOGY
