Bonnie Gordon

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Bonnie Gordon fuses her interdisciplinary interests to add sound to the well-established industry of scholarship devoted to gender and the body in early modern Europe. Specifically, this musician and teacher uses vocal music written for the seventeenth-century Italian female singer to illuminate our understanding of the music, science, and culture of that period.

Gordon will spend her fellowship year completing her book “Monteverdi’s Unruly Women” (University of California Press, projected publication date 2002), which frames the composer’s madrigals and music dramas written between 1600 and 1640 as windows into contemporary notions of sound, body, voice, and sense. In her book, Gordon will argue that early modern experiences of music reflect a radically distinct way of inhabiting the body—one conditioned by and consistent with a contemporaneous set of medical truths and literary representations.

A recipient of a Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, Gordon is an assistant professor of music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Gordon earned her PhD in music history with a graduate certificate in women's studies from the University of Pennsylvania. She has played viola with the Harvard University Baroque Ensemble, the University of Pennsylvania Baroque Ensemble, and the Slovak Opera Orchestra.