Kirsten Paige

Bio

Dr. Kirsten Paige is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Musicology at North Carolina State University.  Paige received her Ph.D. in Music History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018, and previously studied at the University of Cambridge and University of Chicago. Prior to coming to Raleigh, Paige spent three years as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Music in Stanford University’s liberal arts program for first-year undergraduates. 

Paige’s research bridges historical musicology with the global history of science and technology, history and philosophy of race, and media theory. Her work examines the history of music, science, and political thought in the long nineteenth century, with a special focus on environmental discourses. She is particularly invested in understanding the relationship of musical thought and materials to the Anthropocene and theorizing new disciplinary directions in response to its inequitable logics. 

Paige’s essays on the histories of music, sound, and environment have appeared in journals including the Cambridge Opera Journal, Opera Quarterly, The Journal of the American Musicological Society, Sound Studies and The Journal of the Royal Musical Association. Paige guest-edited and contributed an essay to a special issue of 19th-Century Music (“Music and the Invention of Environment”), which appeared in Summer 2021. She is the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Music & the Environment with Lonán Ó Briain. 

Paige’s first book, “”Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology,”” is currently under contract 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 ecomusicological thinking continues to perpetuate unmarked Wagnerian ideas of nature, music, and “the human.” 

Paige’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Musicological Society, Royal Musical Association, British Library, Oxford University Press, 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. 

She has presented her work at national and international conferences, including at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, Royal Musical Association, and German Studies Association. She has also participated in panels and written essays for the Michigan Opera Theater, Chicago Lyric Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Canadian Opera Company, and has spoken in symposia at the University of Helsinki, University of York, Duke University, Cornell University, and Harvard University. She is a co-founder of the Music Studies & the Anthropocene Research Network, which hosted discussion-intensive conferences in Summer 2022 and 2023.

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)