Kirsten Paige
Assistant Teaching Professor, Musicology
Department of Music
Price Music Center 209
Bio
Dr. Kirsten Paige is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Musicology at NC State. Before coming to Raleigh, she spent three years as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Music in Stanford University’s liberal arts program for first-year undergraduates (“Thinking Matters”). Paige received her Ph.D. in Music History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018, and previously studied at the University of Cambridge (M.Phil. in Music, 2012) and University of Chicago (B.A. in Music History and Theory, 2011). From the ages of 13-18, she studied double bass at the Juilliard School of Music’s Pre-College Division.
Paige’s work explores how forms of scientific (especially, environmental) knowledge reshaped musical practices and aural cultures in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, with a special focus on global cultural and scientific exchanges. She maintains a strong interest in public musicology, particularly in how music and its institutions can offer decolonial, collaborative responses to the climate crisis and its inequalities. Paige’s essays have appeared in journals including The Cambridge Opera Journal, Opera Quarterly, The Journal of the American Musicological Society, and The Journal of the Royal Musical Association. Her book, Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology, is currently under contract with University of Chicago Press. Paige guest-edited and contributed an essay to a special issue of 19th-Century Music (“Music and the Invention of Environment”), forthcoming in Summer 2021. Paige’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Musicological Society, Royal Musical Association, British Library, and Berkeley’s Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities and Institute of International and Comparative Studies.
Paige 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.
Education
Ph.D. Music History University of California, Berkeley 2018
M.Phil. Music University of Cambridge 2012
B.A. Music History and Theory University of Chicago 2011
Area(s) of Expertise
Musicology
Publications
- Echo , SOUND STUDIES (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)
- Wagnerian Climatic Fantasies: Sound, Space, Breath , European Romantic Review (2017)
- The Owl, the Nightingale and the Jew in the Thorn-bush: Relocating Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger , Cambridge Opera Journal (2016)