Julia Doe

Julia Doe is Associate Professor of Historical Musicology at Columbia University, specializing in the music, literature, and politics of eighteenth-century France. She is the author of The Comedians of the King (University of Chicago Press, 2021), as well as articles in the Journal of Musicology, Cambridge Opera Journal, and Eighteenth-Century Music, among other publications. Doe is the recipient of the H. Colin Slim, Alfred Einstein, and M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet awards from the American Musicological Society, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright Program.

At the Institute, Doe will be writing Microhistories of Empire: Music and Slavery in Saint-George’s Paris which investigates the transatlantic circulation of performers, patrons, and repertoires in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on extensive work in both legal and musical archives, the book is structured as a series of case studies radiating outward from the virtuoso violinist, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. The project sheds new light on the mechanisms of cultural transfer between European powers and their colonial holdings, while recentering the musical labor of African and African-descended people in ancien-régime and revolutionary France.