Dr. Jennifer Saltzstein
Ruth Verne Davis Reaugh Professor of Music
Presidential Professor of Music
Professor of Musicology
Email: jennifersaltzstein@ou.edu
Jennifer Saltzstein teaches courses on European musics from the Ancient, medieval, renaissance, and baroque eras, exploring music’s relationships to literature and the visual arts, the sacred, gender, sexuality, geography, the environment, social status, and violence. She is author of The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013) and editor of Musical Culture in the World of Adam de la Halle (Leiden: Brill, 2019). She has published book chapters in numerous interdisciplinary collections of essays and peer-reviewed articles in Viator, Musica Disciplina, Early Music, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2017 and 2019).
Saltzstein has served the American Musicological Society as a member of the Council, the Committee on Honorary and Corresponding Members, the Program Committee for the Annual Meeting (San Antonio, TX), the H. Colin Slim Award Committee (2020–2022, chair in 2022), and the Committee on Career Related Issues (member in 2023, chair in 2024). She has received grants and awards from the Huntington Library Foundation, the International Machaut Society, the American Musicological Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded her both a summer stipend (2014) and a year-long fellowship (2016–2017). In 2018, her article, “Rape and Repentance in Two Medieval Motets” (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2017), was given the H. Colin Slim Award of the American Musicological Society, which honors each year a musicological article of exceptional merit, in any language and in any country by a scholar who is past the early stages of their career.
Saltzstein’s latest book, Songs of Nature in Medieval Northern France: Toward an Environmental History, was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press. She is currently embarking on a new project on music and human enhancement.
- PhD - University of Pennsylvania (Music History)
- BA - UCLA (clarinet performance)
