Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, I completed my B.A. in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College in Annapolis, MD (2017) before receiving my M.M. in Musicology at the Peabody Institute at the Johns Hopkins University (2020).
As a student in these programs, I concentrated on how musical and literary works wound about each other in the Western tradition, writing specifically on modernist authors like Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. Why, I wonder, do authors turn to language to articulate musical impressions, despite the durable Romantic belief that one can never fully express the other? Literature, I believe, does more than imitate musical experience; it opens a world in which musicians can discover how others hear music, make music, and think about music. As a musicology student at Berkeley, I continue to explore this subject while extending my investigation to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, experimental music and opera, literary theory, and philosophy.