Alexandra Kieffer, Associate Professor, Rice University; Efficacious Song: Music, Bodies, and Religion in Modern Thought

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Alexandra Kieffer is Associate Professor of Musicology at Rice University. Her book, Debussy’s Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism, published by Oxford University Press, explores ideas about sensation, listening, and emotion in early twentieth-century Debussy reception in the context of emerging scientific discourse on psychology and the senses. Her work on Debussy, Ravel, and early twentieth-century French musical culture has also appeared in 19th-Century Music, Music Theory SpectrumThe Journal of Musicology, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Her scholarship has been supported by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and the American Musicological Society’s M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet fund. Before arriving at Rice, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University.