KATHERINE BERGERON

Katherine Bergeron has taught on the faculties of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tufts University, and the University of California at Berkeley. She joined the Brown faculty in 2004, where she was chair of the Music Department and now serves as the Dean of the College, Brown’s highest undergraduate academic office.

Her scholarship has focused on French music and culture at the fin-de-siècle, the discipline of musicology, experimental music, song, poetry, opera, and film. She is co-editor, with Philip Bohlman, o fDisciplining Music (University of Chicago Press, 1992), and author of Decadent Enchantments (University of California Press, 1998), which won the Deems-Taylor Award from ASCAP in 1999. In 2004 she edited a special issue on Music, Rhythm, and Language for the journal Representations. She most recently completed Voice Lessons (Oxford University Press, 2010), a study of French language education, linguistic science, and the emergence of the vocal art known as la mélodie française.

Bergeron’s teaching and research have been animated by performance. A singer of eclectic tastes, she has performed Gregorian chant, the blues, the court music of central Java, contemporary pop music, experimental music, and, most recently, French art song.

Her newest book, Voice Lessons: French Mélodie in the Belle Epoque (Oxford 2010) won the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP in 2011, as well as the Otto Kinkeldy award from the American Musicological Society, the highest honor accorded to a senior scholar in the field.