Francesca Brittan, PhD

Associate Professor
Department of Music
College of Arts and Sciences
Affiliated Faculty
Department of Cognitive Science
College of Arts and Sciences
Head of Musicology
Coordinator of Graduate Studies in Musicology

Francesca Brittan is a scholar of music and sound cultures 1800-present. She holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University (2007), and was a Research Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge between 2006-08. She joined the Dpt. of Music at Case in 2009 and accepted a secondary appointment in the Dpt. of Cognitive Science in 2023. Her current research and graduate-level teaching focuses on sonic histories of medicine; conceptions of auditory attention/cognition from the eighteenth- to the twenty-first century; music and neuroscience (including neurodivergent auralities); music and the emotions; and psychologies of listening. At the undergraduate level, she offers classes on music and mind; environmental sound, orchestral and conducting cultures; and sonic histories of magic.

Brittan’s first book, Music and Fantasy in the Age of Berlioz (Cambridge, 2017) traces intersections between musical enchantment and romantic science from Berlioz to Stravinsky. Current book projects include Instruments of Mind: Cognitive Orchestrations, examining historical and current entanglements between musical and neural organologies; and The Spectral Conductor: Histories and Post-Histories of Orchestral Power, tracing intersections among conductors, magicians, mesmerists, CEOs, and neuroscientists. She is co-editor of The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, Subjectivity (in progress for Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, with Carmel Raz); and Berlioz and His World (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2024, with Sarah Hibberd). 

Brittan serves as Co-Editor of the Journal of Musicology and General Editor of the series Recent Researches in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Music for A-R Editions. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (University of Toronto), a Junior Research Fellowship (University of Cambridge), a Senior Research Fellowship (University of Amsterdam), a W.P. Jones Presidential Faculty Development Award (CWRU), and the Dimitrije Pivnicki Award in Neuro and Psychiatric History (McGill University). In 2012, she won the American Musicological Society’s Alfred Einstein Award. In 2024 she served as scholar-in-residence at the Bard Festival.  

In addition to her scholarly activities, Brittan is active as a fortepianist and teacher of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century performance practices. She teaches in the Historical Performance Program at CWRU and holds an appointment in the Keyboard Division at the Cleveland Institute of Music.