Each year, the Division of the Humanities at the University is able to award approximately 22 Dissertation Completion Fellowships to doctoral students who are sufficiently advanced in the writing of their dissertation that they are expected to complete the dissertation during the time they hold the award. These fellowships recognize the student’s academic achievement and enable the student to devote full attention and effort towards completing the dissertation.
This year, two PhD candidates in the Department of Music have been awarded these competitive fellowships.
Barbara Dietlinger, Mellon Foundation-University of Chicago Dissertation Completion Fellowship
Barbara Dietlinger, a fifth year PhD candidate in the Department of Music, has been awarded a Mellon-Foundation-University of Chicago Dissertation Completion Fellowship for her dissertation titled “Music and Commemoration in Early Modern Northern Europe – Visual and Sonic Intersections of Remembrance.” Dietlinger will spend the 2020-21 academic year writing and ending her dissertation, and hopefully conducting an archival research trip to the British Library and teaching her course “Music in War, Conflict, and Peace” in Spring 2021.
Abstract:
“Music and Commemoration in Early Modern Northern Europe – Visual and Sonic Intersections of Remembrance,” explores the role of music and visuals in commemorative events in Europe throughout the seventeenth century—a century scarred by the ongoing Wars of Religion that were ended halfway through the century. Besides common family celebrations, such as weddings and funerals, the dissertation focuses on the centenary of the Reformation and the Peace of Westphalia. For this multi-confessional and -regional study, the adjacent polities of the Lutheran House of Wettin in Saxony, the Catholic Habsburgs in Bohemia, and the decentralized and predominantly Calvinist Dutch Republic serve as a framework for music’s place in institutional and private commemoration.
Andrew White, Franke Institute for the Humanities Dissertation Completion Fellowship
PhD Candidate Andrew White, another member of the 2015 Department of Music cohort, has received the Franke Institute for the Humanities Dissertation Completion Fellowship. White will spend the 2021 year writing his dissertation, titled “The Improvised Text: Bodily Regimes of Piano Improvisation in the Nineteenth Century.”
Abstract:
“The Improvised Text: Bodily Regimes of Piano Improvisation in the Nineteenth Century,” develops a theory of musical textuality using tools from linguistic anthropology and the cognitive study of skill. This project draws from pedagogical materials written by Carl Czerny, Simon Sechter, and Friedrich Wieck, as well as accounts of Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt. It uses a vocabulary of entextualization, bodily skill, and pedagogy to recover mid-nineteenth-century piano improvisation as a process.