Peter Pesic is Musician-in-Residence and Director of the Science Institute at St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM, USA. A physicist by training, he is a pianist and has written extensively on the history of science, music, and ideas. His recent writings have concerned the influence of music on the sciences. His books include Music and the Making of Modern Science (2014), which received the American Publishers Award in music and the performing arts, and Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres (2017). His current project is a book entitled Sounding Bodies: The Sonic Turn in Biomedical Science. He has received a Guggenheim fellowships, the Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize of the History of Science Society, and the Peano Prize. In concert, he has recently performed cycles of the complete piano music of Ravel and Stravinsky.
Francesca Brittan is Associate Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University. Her first monograph, Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz (CUP, 2017), explores interactions among magic, sound, and romantic science. Current projects include a book on the history of conducting (The Conductor's Wand: Orchestral Power from Mendelssohn to Bernstein) and a collection of essays on music and romantic forms of attention. Among her honors is the 2011 Alfred Einstein Award.
Mark A. Pottinger is Professor of Music and Chair of the Department of Music and Theater at Manhattan College in New York City. He is the author of a number of publications on the music and cultural life of nineteenth-century Europe, including his ‘Wagner in Exile: Paris, Halévy and the Queen', which appeared in this journal in 2015. Winner of the prestigious Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin in 2017, his current book project, Science and the Romantic Vision in Early Nineteenth-Century Opera, examines the work of early nineteenth-century scientists and the relationship between the sciences and the ‘sound of nature’ in German, Italian and French romantic opera. Additional areas of research include a critical study of acoustics in the modern concert hall as well as the reception of American popular music in France at the end of the nineteenth century.
Julia Kursell is Professor of Musicology at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include the relationship between music and science in the nineteenth century and the history of musicology. She is the author of Epistemologie des Hörens: Helmholtz' physiologische Grundlegung der Musiktheorie (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2018) and the founding editor of the journal History of Humanities (U. of Chicago).
