đź“… Date: Friday, October 16, 2026
đź•’ Start Time: 4:00 PM
đź“Ť Location: Harkness Chapel, Classroom
đź‘Ą Who: Free | Open to the public
About The Series
Our weekly Friday colloquia showcase current research by distinguished visiting scholars alongside our own faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education. A brief reception follows each talk to keep the conversation going. All are welcome!
About The Talk
“With Laughter, Love, and a Touch of Madness: My Scholarly Life”
What kind of life can scholarship make? In this talk, Georgia Cowart looks back on her own scholarly journey through two figures who have appeared and reappeared throughout much of her mature work: Venus, goddess of love, beauty, and pleasure, and Folly, the irreverent female fool whose laughter upsets the established order. She first encountered them as objects of research in the musical theater of early modern France and eventually in the paintings of Antoine Watteau. Following them has led her across centuries and disciplinary boundaries, from music and theater to dance, painting, performance, and cultural history, and through a series of discoveries she could scarcely have imagined when she began.
Looking back, however, Cowart has come to see Venus and Folly as more than historical subjects. The qualities they embody—pleasure and beauty, laughter and play, freedom and irreverence—have also shaped the ways she has approached scholarship, leadership, teaching, collaboration, and the arts. Their repeated presence throughout her work provides a lens through which to reflect more personally on the life that took shape along the way—and on scholarship itself as an imaginative and creative way of being in the world.
About The Speaker
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 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 scholarship and the arts.
Venue Information
Harkness Classroom, located inside Harkness Chapel, serves as both a lecture hall for large classes and a backstage area during events. It is also the meeting location for the CWRU Music Colloquium Series.
Health + Safety
The health and well-being of our community is important to us as we gather for campus events. University Health and Counseling Services provides up-to-date guidance and resources to help support a safe campus experience. For life-threatening emergencies, please call CWRU Public Safety immediately at 216.368.3333.