Nancy van Deusen is a musicologist and music theorist with ongoing interest in music analysis, van Deusen has intersected disciplines often kept apart on more conventional, standardized music faculties. Equally at home in music theoretical systems, analytical discourses, and historical issues as well as historical anthropology, she transcends the boundaries between music theory, history, and practice within a cultural context in both her teaching and her scholarly publications.
Since receiving her PhD in musicology and music theory from Indiana University, Van Deusen has published on music and institutional culture in medieval Rome, the cathedral milieu of 11th- and 12th-century France, and music in the history of ideas. She is a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, several Fulbright Research Grants, and an American Philosophical Society Research Grant. Her teaching career has included positions at California State University, Northridge, and at the Institute for Musicology at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Her book Music and Theology at the Early University (Brill Press, 1995) explores the concept of a university as well as music’s place as an analogical bridge between the natural sciences and philosophy within that concept. Her current book project deals with the development of a notion and academic discipline of folklore and folk music during the 19th century as a reinvention and retooling of significant medieval concepts.
Van Deusen continues to publish books and articles on medieval music, including her forthcoming work, Old Stones New Music: Materiality, Culture, and Music in Central Europe (Brepols Publishers).
Old Stones New Music: Materiality, Culture, and Music in Central Europe. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, Forthcoming.
Co-edited with Leonard Michael Koff. Time: Sense, Space, Structure. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2016.
“Simultaneous Times: Synderesis and its Musical Exemplification.” In Time: Sense, Space, Structure, edited by Nancy van Deusen and Leonard Michael Koff, 112–140. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers, 2016.
The Cultural Context of Medieval Music. Music, Devotion, Emotion, Intellection. Praeger Series on the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge-Praeger Publishers, 2011.
Music and Theology at the Early University: The Case of Robert Grosseteste and Anonymous IV. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History. New York: Brill Press, l995.