Meet the Songscapes Team

Katherine Larson is a Professor at the University of Toronto and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research and teaching centre on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature and culture, with particular interests in early modern women’s writing, gender and language, rhetoric and embodiment, and music (especially opera and song). Her first monograph, Early Modern Women in Conversation (Palgrave, 2011; pbk. 2015), considers how gender shaped conversational interaction in England between 1590 and 1660. She has also co-edited two essay collections, Re-Reading Mary Wroth (Palgrave, 2015) and Gender and Song in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2014; rpt. Routledge, 2016), as well as special issues of Renaissance and Reformation and the University of Toronto Quarterly. Katherine’s articles have examined topics ranging from early modern games to the songs pervading Moulin Rouge. Her most recent book, The Matter of Song in Early Modern England: Texts in and of the Air (Oxford University Press, 2019), which features a companion recording, situates song as a multi-dimensional form that demands to be considered in embodied, gendered, and performance-based terms.

Scott A. Trudell is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where his research and teaching focus on early modern literature, media theory and music. In addition to his current work on song and mediation from Sidney and Shakespeare to Jonson and Milton, he has research interests in gender studies, digital humanities, pageantry and itinerant theatricality. His work has been published in Shakespeare Quarterly, Studies in Philology and a number of edited collections, and he is a contributor to the web-based Map of Early Modern London. Dr. Trudell’s book, Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2019), studies the impact of vocalists and composers upon the poetic culture of early modern England by examining the media through which—and by whom—its songs were made.

Sarah F. Williams is an Associate Professor of Music History at the University of South Carolina School of Music and specializes in early modern (c. 1580-1650) English music and culture including seventeenth-century popular music, theatrical music and broadside balladry. Her work focuses on musical representations of witchcraft and magic, music and memory, inter-media and digital approaches to the early modern English ayre, economies of gender in early modern European culture, the 16th- and 17th-century English cheap print trade, as well as emo rock and expressions of masculinity in contemporary American popular music.  Dr. Williams' book, Damnable Practises: Music, Witches, and Dangerous Women in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads (Ashgate, 2015) examines the representations of witches and unruly women in seventeenth-century English cheap print and popular song. Her articles and reviews have appeared in several top-tier musicology and humanities journals as well as essay collections published by Ashgate, Brill, Indiana University Press, and Routledge. She has presented papers at history, literary studies, and musicological conferences throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. 

Raffaele Viglianti is a Research Programmer working on the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) development team, where his work revolves around digital editions and textual scholarship. As a researcher, Dr. Viglianti specializes in editions of music scores, contributing to the ongoing change to scholarly editorial theory and practice in the digital medium. His work also focuses on the shaping of music performance practice by the digital consumption of music scores, or the performance of a music score from a digital device. He is currently an elected member of the Text Encoding Initiative technical council and an advisor for the Music Encoding Initiative, which produces guidelines for the digital representation of music notation with a focus on scholarly requirements. He holds a PhD in Digital Musicology from King’s College London. 

Chad Crichton is the campus liaison librarian for the Department of English, the Department of Philosophy, and programs in Linguistics at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He has presented on a variety of topics at library conferences in both North America and Europe and has also published a number of scholarly articles on academic librarianship. In 2017, he co-edited the book Mobile Technology and Academic Libraries: Innovative Services for Research and Learning, published by ACRL. Chad earned an Honours BA from Queen’s University in 1998, an MA in English literature from Wilfrid Laurier University in 1999, and his MLIS from McGill University in 2002.