Michael Carlson

Graduate Student (Ph.D. Candidate)

Michael Carlson is a Ph.D. Candidate (5th year) whose dissertation in progress concerns the Milanese rhetorician and priest Aquilino Coppini’s spiritual contrafacts of Claudio Monteverdi. His research on music and culture in Early Modern Milan is supported by The Renaissance Society of America’s Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship and UNC’s program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies. He is an engaged scholar who has presented his work at The American Musicological Society’s Southeast Chapter (student paper award) and The Intenational Medieval and Renaissance Conference (Upsala, Sweden) with upcoming papers at The Renaissance Society of America (San Juan, PR), The Society of Seventeenth-Century Music (Clevland), “Sacred Drama”: Art, Devotion and Performance in the Age of Religious Reformation, c. 1500–c.1700 (St. Andrews, U.K.) and the Biennial International Conference on Baroque Music (Haute École de Musique de Genève-Neuchâtel). His published work will appear in The Renaissance Quarterly (Spring 2023).

Michael earned his B.M. in music history from The Catholic University of America, (Washington, DC). He then studied philosophy at Boston College before continuing his graduate education in theology by earning an S.T.B. and S.T.L. from the Pontifical Gregorian University (Rome, Italy). He completed a M.M. in musicology from The University of Hartford (The Hartt School) with a master’s thesis exploring the Ignatian dimension of Domenico Zipoli’s mission-opera, San Ignacio de Loyola.

While at UNC Michael has taught courses in Music Theory, Opera History, and The History of Rock Music. Research interests include post-Tridentine spiritual contrafacts, opera, music-text relationships, Monteverdi studies, and Historically Informed Performance.