About

Cynthia Cyrus is Professor of Musicology and Affiliated Faculty in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her interest in historical musical literacy intersects with an interest in women’s monasticism in the 14th-16th centuries, and has resulted in a number of articles and book chapters as well as The Scribes for Women’s Convents in Late Medieval Germany (Toronto 2009) and a historiographical study, Received Medievalisms: A Cognitive Geography of Viennese Women’s Convents (Palgrave/Macmillan 2013). She has contributed articles to Early Music, Plainsong and Medieval Music, Florilegium, Journal of the Early Book Society, Early Modern Women, NASM Proceedings, and Popular Music.

She is developing a secondary area in Shakespeare and Music, reflected in her most recent article, “Signposting Shakespeare on the Global Stage,” https://lfq.salisbury.edu/. She teaches a course on “Music, Pandemics, and History” and welcomes contact on that front as well.

Cyrus spent the middle part of her career in the University administration, first as Associate Dean for the Blair School of Music, and then as Associate Provost and Vice Provost for Learning and Residential Affairs at Vanderbilt University. She relished the opportunity to work with students, colleagues, donors, and other supporters of the university’s mission. She considers committee work to be much like chamber music — everyone playing an essential role in moving toward the best possible end goal. But she also enjoys the quiet of scholarly work “down lakeside,” turning a series of small data-points into a broader picture of the significant place of music in our historic past.

Twitter: @scholar_farmer; Mastodon: @scholar_farmer@zirk.us; VU email: Cynthia dot Cyrus at vanderbilt.edu