Kirsten Paige

Bio

I am currently an Associate Teaching Professor of Musicology at North Carolina State University. I was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University and earned my Ph.D. in Music History at the University of California, Berkeley in 2018. Before coming to Berkeley, I received an M.Phil. in Music from the University of Cambridge and A.B. in Music History and Theory from the University of Chicago.

My research examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual and political histories of music, race, and the environment, within and between Europe and Southeast Asia. My teaching and research interests also extend to critical organology, cultural histories of gender and sexuality, and global/transnational opera studies.

My essays have appeared in journals including 19th-Century Music, the Cambridge Opera Journal, The Opera Quarterly, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Sound Studies, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society. My book project, “Richard Wagner’s Political Ecology,” is forthcoming in November 2025 with the University of Chicago Press. The special issue of 19th-Century Music that I guest-edited and contributed an essay to, “Music and the Invention of Environment,” appeared in the Summer of 2021. I am also the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Music & Environment, under contract with Cambridge University Press, and two forthcoming special issues, one in Keyboard Perspectives on global histories of keyboard instruments, and the other in Cultural Politics on music, ecology, and infrastructure.