Rebecca is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Duke University where she also earned her M.A. in musicology. Rebecca’s dissertation focuses on the intersection and interaction of popular experiences and philosophies of music during the French Revolution, specifically the social articulations found within a spectrum of musical performances during the revolutionary decade. She spent the last year digging through archives in Paris, France, and her article “Rousseau and the Revolutionary Repertoire” will appear in the forthcoming volume 43 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.
In addition to her work on seventeenth through nineteenth-century French music, Rebecca also researches and writes about film music, and this academic year is teaching writing courses on music journalism and music as politics from the eighteenth-century to the present. Her music as politics students will complete digital sound projects on Music as Politics in North Carolina through the Audiovisualities Lab.
Rebecca’s works in conjunction with the Audiovisualities Lab on her Soundbox project. The project is a digital sound archive of eighteenth-century Paris that re-creates the web of sonic knowledge that Parisians lived within and explores how that web transformed and persisted over the course of the century, particularly in relation to the circulation of French Enlightenment thought (1749-1789) and the French Revolution (1789-1799). This is Rebecca’s first large-scale foray into sound studies in eighteenth-century contexts, as well as into the digital humanities, and she hopes to shed new light on how the digital humanities can facilitate intimate, embodied research of musical and sound sources from the pre-recording era.
She holds B.A. degrees in history and in international studies, phi beta kappa, from the Penn State Schreyer Honors College. You can follow her on Twitter @BeccaSchwinRoy