David J. Rothenberg is a music historian specializing in medieval and Renaissance Europe.
His research explores connections between music, liturgy, visual art, and literature.
Publications include The Flower of Paradise: Marian Devotion and Secular Song in Medieval and Renaissance Music (Oxford University Press, 2011); Music and Culture in the Middle Ages and Beyond: Liturgy, Sources, Symbolism, co-edited with Benjamin Brand (Cambridge University Press, 2016); and the Oxford Anthology of Western Music, Volume 1: From the Earliest Notations to the Early Eighteenth Century, co-edited with Robert R. Holzer (Oxford University Press, 2013, 2nd ed. 2019). He served as a senior editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2015) and was music book review editor for the medieval studies journal Speculum (2014–17).
Rothenberg’s research has been supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, and CWRU’s W. P. Jones Presidential Faculty Development Fund. In 2007 he received the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society.
He frequently gives preconcert lectures and other general audience presentations for The Cleveland Orchestra, Cleveland Chamber Music Society, Cleveland Museum of Art, and other arts organizations. He has taught at CWRU since 2005 and served as Chair of the Department of Music from 2015 to 2024.