Georgia Cowart’s scholarship explores the interplay of music, spectacle, and cultural memory in early modern France. Her work spans multiple books and numerous articles, including The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (University of Chicago Press, 2008), which examines the arts of spectacle at the court of Louis XIV and their transformation as they moved into the public sphere. Her forthcoming book, After the King: Watteau, Spectacle, and the Poetics of Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2026), turns to Watteau’s late paintings to explore how, in the wake of the king’s death, the legacy of absolutist spectacle was recast as theatrical memory. Drawing on art history, musicology, and theater studies, it proposes a new framework for understanding Watteau’s art as a site of cultural recomposition, in which the symbols of monarchy are reimagined through irony, sensuality, and poetic transformation.
Her article “Antoine Watteau and the Subversive Utopia of the Opera-Ballet” (The Art Bulletin, 2001) received 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, where she also served as guest curator of the exhibition Watteau, Music & Theater (2009). Her work has also been supported by the Stanford Humanities Center, where she served as Marta Sutton Weeks Senior Fellow, as well as by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2020, she was elected to Honorary Membership in the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music in recognition of her scholarship, mentoring, and service to the field.
She has held major leadership roles in the American Musicological Society, including president (2022–24) and vice president (2016–18), in addition to earlier service as Director-at-Large and as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. She also served as president of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (2006–09). At Case Western Reserve University, she has served as Chair of the Department of Music and Interim Chair of the Department of English. Her teaching has been recognized with the university’s Excellence in Writing Instruction Award and the Jessica Melton Perry Award for Disciplinary and Professional Writing Instruction.
Early in her career, she founded and directed Harmony, a school dedicated to the creative arts that brought together students from segregated Black and white churches in Columbia, South Carolina. Throughout her career she has maintained a longstanding interest in creativity and in innovative, inclusive, interdisciplinary approaches to musicological study.