About
Gillian L Gower is a musicologist and medievalist specializing in the cultural history of medieval England and Scotland. Her research focuses on the ways in which women and racial minorities use music as a discourse through which to negotiate, construct, and challenge forms of power and authority. Dr. Gower’s current book project, Queenship and Music in Medieval England, examines tensions between gender and power in English religious song, ca. 1200-1500. Other scholarly interests include medievalism in popular music and culture as well as medieval codicology and paleography.
Since 2020, Dr. Gower has been Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Denver (DU). In addition to her work at DU, Dr. Gower is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, where she contributes to the Carnegie Trust-funded digital humanities project “Towards a Prosopography of Scottish Musicians before the Reformation.” In 2019, she was elected to the committee on Musicology at Kalamazoo, which convenes sessions on medieval music scholarship and pedagogy at the annual International Congress of Medieval Studies held in Kalamazoo, MI. She previously held teaching appointments at UCLA and Southern Methodist University. Education
PhD, Musicology — University of California, Los Angeles
MA, Music — Hunter College of the City University of New York
BA, Writing Seminars – Johns Hopkins University Publications
“A Musical Letter from Eleanor of Provence to Margaret of Scotland: Patronage as Authorship in the Sequence
Ex te lux oritur.” In
Female-Voice Song and Women’s Musical Agency in the Middle Ages, edited by Anna Grau Schmidt and Lisa Colton, 422–456. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2022)
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004517035_017
“Race-ing Plainchant: Theodore of Tarsus, Hadrian of Canterbury, and the Voices of Music History.” Global Exchanges in the North Atlantic, ca. 350–1300, edited by Nicole Lopez-Jantzen, Nahir Otoño-Gracia, and Erica Weaver.
Viator 51(1) (2020) [October 2021]: 103-120.
https://doi.org/10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.127039
“Disciplining Guinevere: Courtly Love and the Arthurian Tradition from Henry Purcell to Donovan Leitch.”
In
The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, edited by Stephen Meyer and Kristen Yri, 484-508. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Projects
Prosopographical database of Scottish musicians before the Reformation. Digital humanities project with PIs Dr. James Cook and Dr. Adam Whittaker. Memberships
American Musicological Society
Medieval Academy of America
Modern Languages Association
Musicology at Kalamazoo
North American British Music Studies Association
Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship
