Karen Hiles

Karen Hiles is currently an English teacher at the Stevenson School, Pebble Beach.  She has previous held positions as an Assistant Professor of Music at Muhlenberg College, and as a Visiting Scholar at the UC Davis Humanities Institute.  She holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from Columbia University (2009). A specialist in eighteenth-century music, Hiles' research focuses on Vienna and Joseph Haydn. She is particularly interested in the diverse political, social, and cultural roles for music during wartime. Her dissertation, "Haydn's Heroic Decades: Music, Politics, and War, 1791-1809," explores this topic in Vienna during the 1790s and 1800s, and was awarded Distinction. Hiles also holds an M.F.A. in musicology from Brandeis University, and a B.A. in English Literature and Music from Swarthmore College.Hiles has been awarded research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Whiting Foundation, and the American Musicological Society (AMS). She was an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellow for 2008. She has presented her research at many conferences, including the national meeting of the AMS (2009), the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2008, 2009, 2010), a joint meeting of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music and the Haydn Society of North America (2008), as well as the International Congress on Medieval Studies (2005). She served as editor-in-chief of the journal Current Musicology from 2005 to 2007 and has contributed reviews to Eighteenth-Century Music and Notes (the quarterly journal of the Music Library Association).