Doctoral Colloquium (Music) | Kristin Franseen

The Doctoral Colloquium is open to all.

Doctoral Colloquium: Kristin M. Franseen, postdoctoral fellow in History at Concordia University, McGill University alumna in Musicology

Title: Imagining Imagining Musical Pasts: On Unusual Sources and the Dissertation-to-Book Process

Abstract: My first book, Imagining Musical Pasts: The Queer Literary Musicology of Vernon Lee, Rosa Newmarch, and Edward Prime-Stevenson (Clemson University Press, 2023), explores the variety of sources, approaches to musical interpretation, and literary genres present in selected early 20^th-century queer historical writings on 18^th- and 19^th-century opera and symphonic music. In this presentation, I will outline the paths this project took over the course of my doctoral studies at the Schulich School of Music and postdoctoral research in the Department of History at Concordia, with a dual focus on some of the joys and challenges of working with unreliable historical sources and the process of continuing to live with the dissertation project after graduation.

Biography: Kristin M. Franseen received her PhD in musicology from McGill University in 2019 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in history at Concordia University, where her research is supported by the FRQSC. Her work appears in various journals and magazines, including Music & Letters, 19th-Century Music, the Journal of Historical Fictions, VAN Magazine, and the Cahiers de la SQRM. Her next project is a literary reception history of Antonio Salieri, with a focus on narratives of gossip and collegiality in the Western musical canon.