Emily Wilbourne

Biographical Information:

Emily Wilbourne is Professor of Musicology and Director of the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College.

Professor Wilbourne specializes in Italian theatrical music and sound during the seventeenth century, and in questions of embodiment, performance, race, gender, and sexuality. Her most recent book, Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence (Oxford University Press, 2023), was the winner of the 2024 Judy Tsou Award from the American Musicological Society and of the 2025 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize for the best book in Renaissance studies from the Renaissance Society of America. She has also published Lesbian/Opera: Elena Kats-Chernin’s Iphis and Matricide: The Musical (Lyrebird Press, 2022); and Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte (University of Chicago Press, 2016). A collection of essays, co-edited with Suzanne G. Cusick, Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity (Open Book Press, 2021) is available via open access. Dr. Wilbourne’s articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women & Music, Recercare, Teatro e storia, Italian Studies, ITER, Echo, and Workplace, as well as in several Oxford Handbooks. In 2011, Dr. Wilbourne was awarded the Philip Brett Award for excellence in queer music scholarship for her article, “Amor nello specchio (1622): Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love”; in 2017-18, she was the Francesco De Dombrowski Fellowship at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence. From 2017-2021 she was Editor-in-Chief of Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. Beginning in Fall 2025, Dr. Wilbourne is Director of the Aaron Copland School of Music.

Recent Publications:

“Feminist Pedagogy and the History Survey: A Reflective Essay.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Music Education, edited by Marissa Silverman and Nasim Niknafs, 36-54. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.

“Blackness, Performance, and Individual Subjectivity between the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production, edited by Nicholas R. Jones, Christina H. Lee, and Dominique E. Polanco, 195-201. New York: Routledge, 2025.

“Gio: Buonaccorsi ‘the Moor’: An enslaved black singer at the Medici Court.” In Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, edited by Matthieu Chapman and Anna Wainwright, 267-287. Arizona Center of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2023. https://asu.pressbooks.pub/race-in-the-european-renaissance-classroom-guide/chapter/giovanni-buonaccorsi-an-enslaved-black-singer-at-the-medici-court/

Published Books

Office: Music Building Room 201

Phone: (718) 997-3813

Email: emily.wilbourne@qc.cuny.edu