Kelly St. Pierre

In addition to researching at the Center for Theoretical studies, Kelly St. Pierre works as an Associate Professor of Musicology at Wichita State University. She received her Ph.D. in musicology from Case Western Reserve University in 2012. Her research examines the roles of propaganda in shaping Czech music and its reception through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book on this topic, Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda, was released in 2017 with the University of Rochester Press. Her newest book project, Trauma and Memory in Czech Folksong Research, focuses specifically on emergence of ethnomusicology alongside notions of ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Czechoslovakia. She spent the academic year 2019-2020 on a Fulbright grant in support of this project, researching at the Czech Academy of Science’s Ethnological Institute as well as serving on the musicology faculty of Prague’s Charles University. In her role as postdoctoral researcher for the project The Second Sense: Sound, Hearing and Nature in Czech Modernity at the Center for Theoretical Studies, she plans to expand her studies to consider Czech music alongside histories of science and medicine through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.