Doctoral candidate Sophie Benn has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Musicology at Western Kentucky University. The CWRU Department of Music is thrilled for Sophie as she takes on this new venture in the coming year.
Sophie is a fifth-year PhD candidate in musicology at CWRU, where she studies notation, music, and the body in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aesthetics. Her research areas include theatrical and social dance, body cultures, historical anatomy, temporality, and performance practice. Sophie is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2020 Adel Heinrich Award for Excellence in Musicological Research, a 2019 Eva L. Pancoast Memorial Fellowship, a 2019 Graduate Affiliateship at the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and a 2017 Fellowship at the Library of Congress, all awarded through CWRU. She currently serves as the Chair of the Dance Studies Association’s Dance and Music Working Group and on the Editorial Board of the peer-reviewed online academic journal Sonic Scope. She served as the President of CWRU’s Music Graduate Student Association in the 2019-2020 academic year, and as Programming Chair for the 2018 Music Graduate Student Conference at Case.
Sophie also maintains an active career as a cellist, specializing in modernist and contemporary repertoire, and is the Director of Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project (CUSP), a presenting organization for experimental contemporary musicians and sound artists that she co-founded in 2017. She also performs as a baroque cellist, and, drawing on a childhood spent in the ballet studio, has appeared as a baroque dancer in productions of Hippolyte et Aricie, Dido and Aeneas and Acis and Galatea. Sophie holds degrees in cello performance, pedagogy, and music history from Rice University and the Cleveland Institute of Music.