David J. Rothenberg is a music historian specializing in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. He has taught at CWRU since 2005, serving as Chair of the Department of Music from 2015 to 2024, and has also taught at Colby College and the University of Chicago.
His publications, which explore connections between music, liturgy, visual art, and literature, 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); 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); and articles and essays in Journal of the American Musicological Society (2006), Journal of Musicology (2004 and 2011), The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century of Music (2015), and Early Music (2020). He served as a senior editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2015) and as music book review editor for the medieval studies journal Speculum (2014–17).
In 2007 Rothenberg was the recipient of the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society. He has received research grants and fellowships from the W. P. Jones Presidential Faculty Development Fund of Case Western Reserve University, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.
In addition to presenting at conferences and colloquia in the United States, Canada, and Europe, he has given numerous public presentations at the Cleveland Museum of Art and is a regular pre-concert lecturer for The Cleveland Orchestra, Cleveland Chamber Music Society, and other musical organizations.