Susan Boynton
Each semester the Italian Academy invites prominent Columbia University professors to open one of their regularly scheduled classes to the public, bringing students and the community together in the Academy building. This fall the Academy welcomes professors from the departments of Art History, History and Music.
Susan Boynton studied musicology and medieval studies at Yale, Brandeis, and Louvain-la-Neuve. Her current research interests include liturgy and music in medieval Western monasticism, with a particular focus on the abbey of Cluny; manuscript studies; monastic education; music in the Iberian peninsula; and music and childhood. Professor Boynton has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy in Rome, and the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). Her first book, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000-1125 (2006), won the Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society. Her second monograph is Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Oxford University Press, 2011). She coedited (with Diane Reilly) The Practice of the Bible in the Western Middle Ages (Columbia University Press, 2011).