Cleveland, Ohio
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Case Western Reserve University will host a conference honoring Georgia J. Cowart, professor of music, October 16–18, 2026, in Cleveland, Ohio.
Scholars and performers will gather to celebrate Cowart’s distinguished career and contributions to the study of music, art, and spectacle in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France.
The conference coincides with two significant milestones: Cowart’s retirement in December 2026 and the publication of her new book, After the King: Watteau, Spectacle, and the Poetics of Memory, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Bringing together colleagues and collaborators from across the field, the conference will reflect on Cowart’s scholarship and its impact while fostering continued conversation around the subjects that have shaped her work. Select papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music.
For conference inquiries, contact John Romey at JRomey@iu.edu.
About
Georgia J. Cowart is a musicologist and cultural historian who explores how music, theater, and the visual arts shaped the political and social imagination of early modern France. She is Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University, where she has also served as chair of the Department of Music and as interim chair of the Department of English. Before coming to Cleveland, she taught for two decades at the University of South Carolina.
Her research centers on the spectacles of Louis XIV’s court, French opera and ballet, and the painter Antoine Watteau. Across her work, she asks how entertainment could serve royal power while also opening a space for satire, dissent, and new ways of imagining society.
Her books reflect this range. The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle examines the court’s use of performance as a political instrument, and her new book, After the King: Watteau, Spectacle, and the Poetics of Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2026), traces the legacy of that culture in Watteau’s art. Earlier studies of French musical criticism and aesthetics helped define the field, and her scholarship has earned honors from art history, musicology, and eighteenth-century studies alike.
Cowart has carried her ideas well beyond the page. She was guest curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Watteau, Music & Theater, which paired paintings and objects with live concerts and dance, and she has lectured at museums and universities across the United States, Europe, and Australia. She has also brought music history to public audiences through radio, television, and original performance.
A committed teacher and mentor, she has received campus-wide teaching awards and recognition for her work in writing instruction. She served as President of the American Musicological Society from 2022 to 2024 and has been supported by leading fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities.