Julia I Doe
Julia Doe is a specialist in the music, literature, and politics of eighteenth-century France. Her first book, The Comedians of the King (University of Chicago Press, 2021), traces the impact of Crown patronage on the development of pre-revolutionary opéra comique. This monograph interrogates how comic theater was exploited in (and worked against) the construction of the monarchy’s carefully cultivated public image—examining the aesthetic, institutional, and political tensions that arose when a genre with popular roots was folded into the courtly propaganda machine.
Prof. Doe is currently at work on two new projects. The first addresses women’s musical labor in the French Enlightenment; the second investigates the circulation of music and musicians between early modern France and the colonial Caribbean (including, but not limited to, the networks of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges). Her essays and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Eighteenth-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, Music & Letters, The Journal of Musicology, and the edited collection Histoire de l’opéra français du roi soleil à la Révolution. Prof. Doe is the recipient of the Alfred Einstein and M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet awards from the AMS, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, the National Opera Association, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Before beginning her tenure-track appointment at Columbia, she served in the music department as a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She received a Ph.D. in musicology from Yale University in 2013.
In addition to her scholarly work, Prof. Doe is keenly interested in public engagement with music of the Enlightenment period. She has assisted with educational events for Columbia’s Maison Française and the Washington, DC-based Opera Lafayette, among other groups, and has discussed her research in interviews with BBC Radio 4 and The Guardian. Between 2020–22 she served as a Director-at-Large on the board of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music. She is currently a member of the AMS Council.
