Department:
Musicology

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Bio
Works

Contact:
hwatkins@esm.rochester.edu
(585) 274-1457

Holly Watkins received her PhD in musicology from the University of California, Berkeley, after completing an MA in musicology and a BA in physics at the University of Virginia. She has published on various topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, including intersections between music and architecture in the work of Arnold Schoenberg and Adolf Loos, critical perspectives on music in Romantic-era Germany, and recent American pastoral music. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music, and Current Musicology. She is finishing a book dealing with metaphors of depth in German music criticism and analysis between 1800 and 1950.

Watkins has presented papers at the conferences of the American Musicological Society, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the Look and Listen Festival in New York City. Her research has been supported by the nationally competitive Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship, the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, and the Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. Her current research and teaching interests include postmodernism, critical theory, aesthetics and philosophy of music, ecocriticism, rock and alternative music from the 1970s onward, and gender studies. In a former life, she enjoyed studying the principles of quantum theory and performing as the lead guitarist in an improvisational grunge-funk trio.