Melani Shahin

Melani Shahin
Cohort Year: 2020
Research Interests: Jewish music, historiography, intellectual history, Science of Judaism, Christian Hebraism, history of music theory, music and religion
Education: MA, Music, University of Chicago, 2023; BA, Music and Philosophy, minor in Religious Studies, Fordham University 2018

About

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Music History and Theory. My dissertation charts the intellectual history of Jewish music research during its emergence as a distinct field of study in German-speaking lands in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am specifically interested in investigating the ways in which Jewish music scholars associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) movement critically engaged with early modern Christian writings that discuss music in the Bible and Jewish musical practices more broadly. My research has been supported by the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, the Fuerstenberg Fellowship for Jewish Studies, and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes’s Leo Baeck Fellowship for German-Jewish Studies. I also received a FLAS Fellowship to study modern Hebrew in the summer of 2024.

I have secondary research interests in the history of music theory. My undergraduate research at Fordham University examined how eighteenth-century German music theorists, such as Andreas Werckmeister, Johann Mattheson, and Lorenz Mizler, conceptualized the relationship between music and mathematics, and how these conceptions influenced their self-fashioning as theorists.

Before coming to UChicago, I taught English in Germany for two years on Fulbright and Pädagogischer Austauschdienst grants. In my free time, I enjoy browsing used bookstores, traveling, playing bass, and learning new languages.

Teaching Experience

  • Introduction to Western Art Music (Instructor of Record, Fall 2023 and Fall 2025)
  • Music in Western Civilization I and II (Course Assistant, Fall 2022 and Winter 2023)