Schulich welcomes Banting Fellowship recipient Karen Desmond.
The Banting Fellowships聽聽program provides funding to exceptional postdoctoral applicants, both nationally and internationally, who will positively contribute to the Canada's economic, social and聽research鈥慴ased聽growth. 聽The 70k renewable fellowships are designed to聽attract and retain top-tier postdoctoral talent, both nationally and internationally, to聽develop their leadership potential and to聽position them for success as research leaders of tomorrow. 聽
Karen Desmond鈥檚 research focuses on the intellectual and aesthetic experience of music in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Her Banting project聽Greedy for New Things: What Novelty Means in Early Fourteenth-Century Music聽will explore the concepts of novelty and innovation in Europe from c. 1290 to c. 1350, and she will examine how big data approaches can inform our understanding of history and cultural production.聽
Using source criticism and close reading, as well as newer methodologies used by digital humanists in their analysis of large datasets of texts, and by some musicologists in their analysis of large repertories of music, Desmond analyses the concepts of newness, invention, and discovery as found in medieval writings on literary composition, rhetoric, philosophy, science, and mathematics. On a more general level, Desmond鈥檚 research investigates the use of theoretical models and tools from other disciplines or other times to describe how change happens in the arts.
Desmond received her聽Ph.D. in musicology in 2009 from New York University. She held a visiting post as Lecturer in Musicology at University College Cork from 2011 to 2013, and as a contract researcher at the University of Cologne from 2012 to 2013. In 2013 she was awarded a one-year NEH Research Fellowship for her monograph on novelty in early fourteenth-century music. She has published articles in聽Journal of Musicology,听Plainsong and Medieval Music,聽Early Music History, and聽Musica disciplina, with a second article in聽Journal of Musicology聽forthcoming, and a translation of Lambertus鈥檚聽Ars musica, edited by Christian Meyer (Ashgate, 2014).
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