Music Department Faculty
Brigid Cohen
Assistant Professor
Office: 218 Hill Hall
Email: bmcohen@email.unc.edu
Phone: 919-962-3415
(Assistant Professor) holds degrees from Harvard University (Ph.D.), Kings College London (M.Mus.), and Wellesley College (B.A.). Before coming to UNC Chapel Hill, she taught at Wesleyan University, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Humanities. Her research and teaching center on twentieth-century musical avant-gardes, jazz, postcolonial studies, cultural theory, migration and diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and intersections of music, the visual arts, and literature. She is currently completing a book on the émigré composer Stefan Wolpe that explores how dilemmas of migration and cultural plurality shaped interdisciplinary modernist movements from the Bauhaus to the kibbutzim to bebop to Black Mountain College. She is also in the beginning stages of a new book project that broadly reframes the history and theory of musical modernism through a sustained focus on experiences of displacement and acts of cultural translation, proposing alternatives to the national matrix that has long guided the study of modern music.
Professor Cohen has presented at numerous conferences, including those of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for Music Theory, the Society for American Music, and the Salzburg Festival. She will be speaking at the Jewish Music Forum and Peabody Conservatory this academic year. Her research has been supported by the Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship (2007), the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) (2006), the Getty Research Institute (2005), the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies at Harvard University (2004-5), the Paul Sacher Foundation (2004), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (2000). She was also the recipient of the Harvard University Bok Center Certificate for Excellence in Teaching (2003-4, 2006-7).
Book in Progress
Modernism Untethered: Wolpe, Music, and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, (Cambridge University Press, New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism Series), in preparation.
Articles
“Politicizing Form, Pluralizing Community: Stefan Wolpe as ‘an old collective individualist or individual collectivist.’” Wiener Jahrbuch für Jüdische Geschichte, Kultur und Museumswesen 8: Musik und Widerstand (2008): 85-100.
“Boundary Situations: Translation and Agency in Wolpe’s Modernism.” Contemporary Music Review 27, no. 2-3 (April 2008): 323-341.
“Wolpe’s ‘Geschichte der Verknüpfungen’: On Writing and Community.“ Mitteilungen der Paul Sacher Stiftung 19 (April 2006): 17-21.
Articles in Progress
“David Tudor: The Performer as Translator at Black Mountain College,” forthcoming in Music at Black Mountain College, ed. Jonathan Hiam (Pendragon Press).
“Wolpe’s Migrant Cosmopolitanism: Music History Beyond the Nation” in Crosscurrents: European and American Music in Interaction, 1900-2000, eds. Felix Meyer, Carol Oja, Wolfgang Rathert, and Anne Shreffler (Pendragon Press and the Paul Sacher Stiftung).
“Wolpes migrantische Kosmopolitanismus” forthcoming in Stefan Wolpe (Musik-Konzepte) ed. Ulrich Tadday (Edition Text + Kritik).