Carolyn Abbate

Carolyn Abbate, a leading scholar in Arts and Culture at Harvard University, holds the position of Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor and Chair of the Department of Music. She earned a B.A. from Yale University in 1977, attended Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich in 1979 and 1980, and received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1984. Abbate joined the Princeton University faculty as an assistant professor in 1984 and was promoted to full professor in 1991. She held visiting academic positions at Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley, Freie Universität Berlin, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and King’s College Cambridge. In 2005, she was appointed Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University and the first Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she was a fellow in 2006–2007. From 2008 to 2013, she served as Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. Upon returning to Harvard in 2013, she was named Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor effective January 1, 2014, Harvard's highest faculty honor for scholars crossing disciplinary boundaries. She is on leave for the 2025-2026 academic year. Abbate has also worked as a dramaturge, director, and translator, with her writings translated into several languages.

Abbate writes about and teaches classes centered on opera over the past four centuries, emphasizing the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her work incorporates linguistics and semiotics, philosophy, film sound and film music, and the history of science. Current research examines mischievous sound technologies and acoustic artifacts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their place in histories of hearing and mishearing, along with microphonics in past historical eras, musical efficacy, and Richard Wagner’s entanglements with nineteenth-century organic chemistry. Her Harvard courses include film music and film sound technology, nineteenth-century music and Romanticism, and opera history. Key publications are Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (1991), In Search of Opera (2001), and A History of Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years (2012, co-authored with Roger Parker), named Best Classical Music Book of the Year by The Sunday Times. Awards and honors include the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association (1993), Guggenheim Fellowship (1995), National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships for Independent Study and Research (1986 and 1994), and the Everett I. Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award (2025). Recognized as one of the world’s most accomplished music historians, her scholarship profoundly influences the field.

Professional Email: cabbate@fas.harvard.edu