Anne MacNeil

Associate Professor 

Anne MacNeil (Associate Professor) BMus, Ithaca College (1981); MA in Music History, Eastman School of Music (1985); PhD in the History and Theory of Music, University of Chicago (1994). Before joining the faculty at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she holds appointments in the Department of Music and the Department of English and Comparative Literatures, Professor MacNeil taught at Northwestern University and the University of Texas at Austin. Her areas of specialization include Renaissance music, music and spectacle, commedia dell’arte, opera, performance studies, historiography, and digital humanities. Her current research encompasses digital humanities, the use of boats, barges, and waterways as venues for musical and theatrical performance in and around Renaissance Mantua; early-modern laments; operatic settings of tales of the Trojan Wars; and the intersections of music, ceremony, and biography in the lives of Isabella d’Este, Margherita Farnese, and Eleonora de’ Medici. Professor MacNeil is Co-Director of the international consortium IDEA: Isabella d’Este Archive (https://isabelladeste.web.unc.edu), an interdisciplinary digital humanities environment for studies relating to Isabella d’Este (1474-1539).

Professor MacNeil serves on the Advisory Council of the American Academy in Rome and is a former Council member and program committee member of the American Musicological Society. She became a fellow of the American Academy in Rome in 1992 and of the American Association of University Women in 2004. Her other honors include an American Musicological Society AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship (1993), National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowships (1990 and 1995), and Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Fellowships for the pursuit of research in the Veneto (1992 and 1997), a UNC Institute for the Arts & Humanities/Digital Innovation Lab Faculty Fellowship (2014), a Dorothy Ford Wiley Grant from UNC’s Program for Medieval and Early Modern Studies for creation of an international symposium “Big Data for Intimate Spaces,” an American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship (2015-16) and an Andrew W. Mellon/National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Digital Editions (2017-18) for her project Italian Songs from the Time of Christopher Columbus. Professor MacNeil was the Director of the Evelyn Dunbar Early Music Festival at Northwestern University in 1997 and Co-Director, with Professor Jeanice Brooks (University of Southampton) of the Austin/Soton Early Music Exchange in 1999.

Professor MacNeil regularly gives public lectures and has spoken at the Newberry Library, the American Academy in Rome, the Università degli Studi di Roma (“La Sapienza”); King’s College, London, the British Academy, Dartmouth University Comparative Literatures Department, the University of California at Santa Cruz Institute for Humanities Research, the University of Cincinnati Classics Department, the Colloque sur les Femmes Musiciennes aux XVIe et SVIIe siècles in Tours, the Interuniversitair Instituut voor Studie van de Renaissance en het Humanisme in Brussels, the Frühe Neuzeit Interdiziplinär Conference, the International Conference on Medieval & Renaissance Music, the British Biennial Conference on Baroque Music, and annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for Sixteenth-Century Studies, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, and the Society for Early Modern Women.