Abbate named University Professor
Carolyn Abbate, one of the world’s most accomplished and admired music historians, has been named to become a University Professor, Harvard’s highest honor for a faculty member. Her appointment as the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor will take effect on Jan. 1, 2014. An influential scholar of exceptional originality, Abbate has focused her research principally on opera as it has evolved over the past four centuries, with special emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. Her work ranges widely, drawing on diverse arts and humanities disciplines, including cultural history, sound and film studies, and philosophy. “Carolyn Abbate’s imagination and sense of intellectual adventure have changed the course of musicology,” said President Drew Faust. “With its original and highly interdisciplinary outlook, her work helps us to see the many disparate elements of opera each in relation to the other, as part of a polyphonic whole, and to see great works in their...