Kirsten Paige

Bio

Kirsten Paige is currently an Associate Teaching Professor of Musicology at North Carolina State University with gratis appointments in the NC State Coastal Resilience & Sustainability Initiative and Climate Solutions Collaborative. Prior to joining the NC State faculty, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University for three years and, in 2018, earned a Ph.D. in Music History & Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Paige earned her earlier degrees at the University of Cambridge (M.Phil. in Music Studies, 2012) and the University of Chicago (A.B. in Music History & Theory, 2011). She studied double bass at the Juilliard School of Music from the age of 13 to 18.

Dr. Paige’s research program examines aesthetic and poetic lives of power and value. Situated at the intersection of global music history and the history of science, her work asks how musical texts, acts, and materials constructed racial, national, and ecological difference in the long nineteenth century. She maintains a strong secondary interest in the global history of musical instruments, ecology and climate, and the infrastructural dynamics of empire.

Her first book, “Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology,” is forthcoming in 2025 with University of Chicago Press. This book explores Wagner’s development of his novel Germanic aesthetic paradigms around contemporary theories of climate, race, and human identity. It argues that this regime of knowledge entwines Wagnerian musical ideations with the intellectual impulses of anthropogenic climate change, and challenges musicologists to consider how disciplinary thought patterns continue to perpetuate unmarked Wagnerian ideas of nature, music, and “the human.”

Dr. Paige has published widely on the global political and cultural history of music and the environment, including in the Cambridge Opera Journal, Opera Quarterly, Sound Studies, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. Many of her recent projects have prioritized collaboration across methodologies and disciplines. Past collaborative projects include the special issue of 19th-Century Music (“Music and the Invention of Environment,” 2021) that she edited, curated, and contributed an essay to by invitation of the Editorial Board. Ongoing edited projects include the Cambridge Companion to Music & the Environment (under contract with Cambridge University Press and co-edited with ethnomusicologist Lonán Ó Briain), a special issue of Keyboard Perspectives on global keyboard histories (forthcoming in 2026 and co-edited with Morton Wan), and a special issue of Cultural Politics on music, energy, and infrastructure (forthcoming in 2026 and co-edited with Thomas Irvine). Equally committed to cultivating intellectual communities, Dr. Paige founded the Music Studies & the Anthropocene Research Network in 2021, which draws together scholars from across disciplines to ask what the Anthropocene demands of the humanities in general and music studies in particular.

Dr. Paige’s work has been supported by awards, grants, and fellowships from the American Musicological Society, Royal Musical Association, British Library, Oxford University Press, the Society for the History of Technology, and Berkeley’s Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities and Institute of International and Comparative Studies. She received a Junior Fellowship from the Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Studies in 2023.

In the classroom, Dr. Paige emphasizes experiential learning, students’ ownership of course content, and, like her research, interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches. She considers her students to be collaborators and co-creators, the classroom a space to explore and solve problems together. Her course offerings at NC State have included courses on the history of music and science; ecomusicology; the history of music, gender, and sexuality; the history of music technology; and introductory courses in Western music history.

Area(s) of Expertise

Nineteenth-century music, opera, history of science and technology, environmental history, intellectual history, history of race, history of politics, media history and theory

Publications

• Echo , SOUND STUDIES (2022)
• Listening to Climate Change , (2022)
• Listening to Daily Life in the Bosavi Rainforest , (2022)
• Introduction , NINETEENTH CENTURY MUSIC (2021)
• On the Politics of Performing Wagner Outdoors: Open-Air Opera, Gesamtkunstwerk and the Third Reich’s ‘Forest Opera’, 1933–45 , Journal of the Royal Musical Association (2021)
• Sonic ecosystems of loss: Voices of the Rainforest at twenty-five , Sound Studies (2021)
• Tectonic Microphonics , NINETEENTH CENTURY MUSIC (2021)
• Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music, by Holly Watkins , Journal of the American Musicological Society (2020)
• Opera’s Inconvenient Truths in the Anthropocene Age: CO2 and Anthropocene , The Opera Quarterly (2020)
• “Art and Climate” and the Atmospheric Politics of Wagnerian Theater , The Opera Quarterly (2019)