Roseen Giles
Musicologist in Residence
Roseen Giles is a musicologist with a specialty in early modern musical culture. She is Assistant Professor of Music at Duke University and curator of the Duke University Musical Instrument Collections. Her research examines the aesthetic, professional, and personal relationships between poets and musicians of the Italian seventeenth-century.
She has published essays on music and philosophy in the Renaissance, memory and orality in the notation of medieval music, and the relationship between music and devotional practice in the seventeenth century. Her monograph—Monteverdi and the Marvellous: Poetry, Sound, and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2023) —argues that the controversial experiments in seventeenth-century literature had a profound influence on techniques in musical composition, listening, and performance.
Her newest book—Lettera amorosa: Musical Love-Letters in Early Modern Italy—explores the musical history of epistolary poetry and is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.