In her early career Georgia Cowart founded and directed Harmony, a school that immersed students in the creative arts and brought together students from segregated black and white churches in Columbia, SC. As a musicologist, she continues to take an interest in creativity and how students can approach musicology in innovative ways. Her current research involves music, the arts, and cultural politics in early modern France. Her article “Antoine Watteau and the Subversive Utopia of the Opera-Ballet” (The Art Bulletin, 2001) won the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Outstanding Article Prize. From 2007 to 2009, she served as Sylvan C. and Pamela Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow in Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and as guest curator of the Met exhibition Watteau, Music & Theater (2009). Her work has also been supported by the Stanford Humanities Center (as Marta Sutton Weeks Senior Fellow, 2011-12), and by grants from the NEH and the ACLS. In 2020 she was elected to Honorary Membership in the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music for her outstanding achievement and the “virtuosic performances” of her writings on seventeenth-century French arts and culture, along with her mentoring and service to the field.
She has served as President of SSCM (2006-09), as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2013-15), as Director-at-Large (2014-16) and Vice President of the AMS (2016-18), and currently as President (2022-24). At Case, she has served as chair of the Department of Music from 2002-07, as Coordinator of Graduate Studies in Musicology from 2014-20, and as Interim Chair of the Department of English (2020-22). Her teaching awards include CWRU’s SAGES Excellence in Writing Instruction Award (2014) and Jessica Melton Perry Award for Disciplinary and Professional Writing Instruction (2016).