Suzanne G. Cusick has published extensively on gender and sexuality in relation to the musical cultures of early modern Italy and contemporary North America. Additionally, she has studied the use of sound and sexual shaming in the detention and interrogation of prisoners held during the 21st century’s “global war on terror.” The winner of prizes from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, 2009) and the American Musicological Society’s LGBTQ Study Group, as well as teaching prizes at the University of Virginia and NYU, she has received fellowships from the ACLS, the NEH, and has been in residence at both Harvard’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies and its Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.. She is an honorary member of both the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology, and will serve as President of the AMS 2018-20. Her current research focuses on gendered, eroticized and political modes of hearing in Medicean Florence.
Suzanne Cusick
Professor Of Music
B.F.A. Newcomb College, 1969; Ph.D. University of North Carolina 1975
gender, sexuality and embodiment in relation to musical culture, especially those of early modern Italy and contemporary North America; acoustemology of contemporary life, especially acoustical violence in contemporary war; feminist and queer approaches to music scholarship; cultural history of music
Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2001-2002)
Books:
Men Hearing Women in Medicean Florence (in progress)
Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court, Music and the Circulation of Power (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
- 2010 Book Award, Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
Select Recent Articles:
Foreward, Ellen Koskoff, A Feminist Ethnomusicology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), in press
"This Song Is For You," Colloquy on Musicology and Sexuality, JAMS 2013, in press
"He Said, She Said? Men Hearing Women in Medicean Florence," in Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe and Jeffrey Kallberg, eds. Changing the Subject: Difference in Music Scholarship (Cambridge, 2014). in press
Gender, Politics, and Gender Politics in La liberazione di Ruggiero," in Christine Fischer and Irene Minder-Jeanneret, eds, Zwischentone -- Musik und Diversitat (Basel, 2014), in press
"Indarno chiedi...': Clorinda and the Interpretation of Monteverdi's Madrigali amorosi e guerrieri," in Beth Glixon et al, eds, Word, Image and Song: Essays in Honor of Ellen Rosand, vol. 1 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 117-144.
"An acoustemology of detention in the "global war on terror,'" in Music, Sound and the Reconfiguration of Public and Private Space, ed. Georgina Born (Cambridge, 2013), 275-291.
"Across an Invisible Line: A conversation about Music and Torture," Grey Room 42 (2010), 6-21.
"Musicology, Torture, Repair", Fifth Column radical musicology 3 (2008)
"'You are in a place that is out of the world": Music in the Detention Camps of the 'Global War on Terror,'" Journal of the Society for American Music 2/1 (2008), 1-26; reprinted in Transpositions 4 (2014)