Biography

Hedy Law received her Ph.D. in music history and theory from the University of Chicago in 2007 with the dissertation “Gestural Rhetoric: In Search of Pantomime in the French Enlightenment, ca. 1750-1785.” She was the recipient of the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship of the American Musicological Society in 2005-2006, the Whiting Dissertation Fellowship in 2006-2007, and the Stuart Tave Course Design Teaching Award at the University of Chicago. She won the Indiana University Press prize for the best student paper given in the 2005-2006 Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society. She taught from 2007 to 2009 the Humanities Core Sequence "Media Aesthetics" at the University of Chicago as Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow of the Society of Fellows. She has given papers in the American Musicological Society national and midwest chapter meetings and at the Feminist Theory and Music conference, among other places. She has published in Eighteenth-Century Music, Notes, Cambridge Opera Journal, and in a collection of essays, Musique et Geste (Peter Lang, 2009). She is currently writing a book on music and nonverbal communication in the French Enlightenment. Her research, broadly conceived, explores the relationships between music and multi-media from the early modern through the twenty-first century and their broader social and cultural impact. In addition to western high art instrumental and vocal music, dance, and opera, she also studies recent multi-media genres such as music video, spectacle, music theater, film, and television commercials. She explains music using archival research and historical methods as well as theories from literary theories, media and communication studies, performance studies, visual culture, and anthropology. In the academic year of 2010-2011, she was one of four recipients of the university-wide Rotunda Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award at SMU.