Professor Jamie Reuland studies the intellectual, aesthetic, and political history of medieval music, and the intersections between musical texts, material culture, and political life in the late-medieval Mediterranean. Her writing has appeared in The Journal of Musicology, New Medieval Literatures, and Plainsong and Medieval Music.
Professor Reuland’s first book, Music and the Making of Medieval Venice (Cambridge University Press, in production) focuses on a set of musical projects that gave form to Venetian history and framed and interpreted the unique material culture of the city as it was in the process of taking shape. Showing the state’s earliest musical endeavors bound up with legal culture, stemming from projects of historiography, or situated within the rich material environment of relics and reliquaries, mosaics and wall paintings, icons and statues, the book theorizes the relationship between dramatic and political forms of representation in Venice’s late-medieval empire in the eastern Mediterranean, and engages enduring questions about music’s relationship to social and symbolic forms, language, religion, and the natural world, arguing for the ways music can be both a metaphor for and constitutive of political life.
Professor Reuland is an executive committee member for the Program in Medieval Studies. Read her full bio on the Department of Music website.
