Thomas Christensen

Thomas Christensen is the Avalon Foundation Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1999.   For the past seven years, he was Associate Dean and Master of the Collegiate Humanities Division at Chicago. Recently he was appointed as Director of the Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.

A scholar of historical music theory and its intellectual and social contexts, he has published a number of monographs, including a major study of the music theory of Jean-Philippe Rameau in 1993.  He was also the editor of the Cambridge History of Western Music Theory which appeared in 2002, and most recently, an anthology of essays published by Ashgate Press in 2014 entitled “The Work of Music Theory.” Professor Christensen has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards;  he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin Germany in 2011-12, and most recently the recipient of both an ACLS and a Guggenheim Fellowship to support his current research project entitled: Stories of Tonality:  Fétis and the Tonal Imagination in the French Nineteenth Century, which will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press.

Professor Christensen earned his PhD from Yale University.  Besides the University of Chicago, he has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Iowa between 1992 and 1999.

*https://music.uchicago.edu/page/thomas-christensen

Ian Cross

Ian Cross (https://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/directory/ian-cross) is based in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, where he is Professor and Director of the Centre for Music and Science, leading a lively group of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in exploring music, its materials and its effects from a wide range of scientific perspectives.  His early research helped set the agenda for the study of music cognition; he has since published widely in the field of music and science, from the psychoacoustics of violins to the evolutionary roots of musicality. His current research explores music and speech as components of the human communicative toolkit, and the consequences of children's engagement in group musical activities on the development of their capacity for empathy. Ian is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge and is also a classical guitarist.

*https://www.mus.cam.ac.uk/directory/ian-cross