Fellows 2012–2013

Robert Bates is professor of music at the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, where he teaches a full studio of organ majors from the undergraduate through doctoral levels. Previously he was University Organist at Stanford University, where he received a Ph.D. in musicology. Bates is a specialist in early organ music, the history of theory, early organ building, and registration practices. His articles have appeared in The Organ Yearbook, Histoire des Sciences, Performance Practice Review, Les Cahiers d’Artes, and The Journal of Early Keyboard Music. He has presented lectures on early French organs and organ music throughout the United States and at international conferences in France. Currently he is writing a book on the history of the organ in France in the sixteenth century based on builders’ contracts held in French departmental and national archives.  Completion of this book, entitled The Organ of the French Renaissance: A Documentary History, and preparation of the accompanying CD of French Renaissance organ music will form the focus of his fellowship year at Yale.

Harald Buchinger is currently professor of liturgical studies at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria. Having obtained a diploma in church music, he studied theology in Vienna and Jerusalem. After graduating from the University of Vienna, he spent three years in Rome engaged in postdoctoral studies and research. During his time as associate professor of liturgical studies in Vienna he also taught liturgy in the Department of Church Music of the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln. He has lectured at various universities, notably in Jerusalem and Leuven. His research focuses on the reception of the Bible in liturgy, on the relationship between Christian and Jewish liturgy, and on the development of the liturgical year; his interests include chant and forms of artistic expression in worship. At Yale he will investigate the liturgy of Holy Week and Easter in the High Medieval West, with special reference to music, drama, and the arts. Mag. Theol., Dr. Theol., University of Vienna.

Melvin L. Butler earned his Ph.D. in music from New York University in 2005 and is an assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago. An ethnomusicologist with broad interests in music and religion of the African diaspora, he has conducted field research on popular music making in relation to charismatic Christianity in Haitian, Jamaican, and African American communities. In these transnational contexts, he interrogates the cultural politics of musical style and religious expression while attending to the role of musical performance in constructing individual and collective identities. Much of his research centers on the phenomenology of Pentecostal musical worship, how the transcendent becomes immanent through musical performance, and the intersections of faith, ritual, gender, and power. These interests fuel his ongoing concern with ethnographic representation and the ways in which scholars negotiate their identities in relation to various fields of supernatural encounter. During his fellowship year he will continue work on his forthcoming book Claiming Haiti: Pentecostalism and the Theopolitics of Musical Performance, which explores music and Pentecostalism in Haiti and its U.S. diaspora.

Kathy Foley is professor of theatre at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has also taught at the University of Hawaii, Yonsei University, and Chulalongkorn University. She is author of the Southeast Asia section of The Cambridge guide to World Theatre and editor of Asian Theatre Journal, and her articles have appeared inTDR, Modern Drama, Asian Theatre Journal, Puppetry International, among others. She trained in mask and puppetry in the Sundanese region of Indonesia, and was the first non-Indonesian invited to perform in the prestigious all-Indonesia National Wayang Festival. As an actress her performance of Shattering the Silence: Blavatsky, Besant, Ruukmini Devi toured the U.S. and England in 2005. She performs frequently in the US and Indonesia and has curated exhibitions of puppets of South and Southeast Asia and masks of Southeast Asia for many institutions. She worked on typology and cosmology with recent fieldwork in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Plays include Farewell to Manzanar (with Jeannie and Jim Houston), Baba (with Belle Yang, and Fox Hunts and Freedom Fighters. At Yale, she will work on a manuscript on Islamic mysticism, music, and mask dance, and puppetry in West Java; the fellowship will also result in performances of wayang(Indonesian traditional theatre).

Ayla Lepine’s art and architectural research combines theological perspectives with investigations of modernity. Her work focuses on Victorian visual culture and sacred space, and her Ph.D. thesis concerned G. F. Bodley’s Gothic Revival projects at Oxford and Cambridge. She has convened international interdisciplinary conferences includingGothic and Its Legacies­ (2009, with Laura Cleaver) and Intersections: Architecture and Poetry (2011, with Caroline Levitt). As a 2012 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Courtauld, Lepine’s research has concentrated on a project titled Revival: Utopia, Identity, Memory. Outputs include a virtual exhibition, a lecture series, and a major conference.

Ms. Lepine has taught postgraduate and undergraduate audiences at the University of Warwick, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the National Gallery, and King’s College London. She has lectured in America, Europe and Australia, on subjects ranging from the Aesthetic Movement and queer perspectives on nineteenth-century imagery to the perception of art as a theological medium. Her work has been published in Music and Modernism (ed. Charlotte de Mille, 2011), Art and Christianity, The Burlington Magazine, and The Architects’ Journal. Her current interests include modern monasticism, Anglican art, cityscapes as soundscapes, contemporary artists’ engagement with sacrament and ritual. B.A., University of Victoria, Canada; Dipl., University of Oxford; M.A., Ph.D., The Courtauld Institute of Art.

David W. Stowe has written widely on music and religion in American culture, including No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (2011); How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (2004), which won an ASCAP Deems Taylor; and Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America (1994), which was published in Japanese in 1999.  He is professor of English and Religious Studies at Michigan State University, where he served as director of the Program in American Studies.  Mr. Stowe taught for three years at the Graduate School of American Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, where he also served as associate dean. He is a founding member of the Institute for the Study of Christianity and Culture, a research institute based in Lansing, Michigan. At Yale, Stowe will research and complete the manuscript for his next book, entitled “Babylon Revisited: How Psalm 137 Helped Americans Make a Nation,” charting the subtle changes in emphasis and interpretation of a thirteen-line Hebrew poem to help make new sense of religious, musical, and political change in North America. B.A., Haverford College; Ph.D., Yale University.

Postdoctoral Associate

Andrew Irving is Assistant Professor of Church History at the General Theological Seminary in New York.  After completing an undergraduate degree in French and German, Dr Irving read pastoral theology at the College of St John the Evangelist, the Anglican seminary in Auckland, New Zealand - his home country. In the United States, Irving completed a masters degree in liturgical studies at the University of Notre Dame before undertaking doctoral studies in the Medieval Institute, an interdisciplinary research institute of Notre Dame. Irving’s research on the production and use of liturgical manuscripts at the Abbey of Montecassino in its golden age at the end of the eleventh century has led him to extensive work at the Abbey, and at numerous other regional and national manuscript libraries in Southern Italy and across Europe, and he is currently preparing his dissertation entitled “Gospel Books in Eleventh-Century Montecassino: An Archaeology,” for publication. In 2012-2013, Irving began a new research project on the material aspects of the transformation of the missal in the twelfth-century as a post-doctoral associate of the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. In addition to his research interests in liturgical manuscripts, monastic cultures, and medieval liturgy, Irving is turning his attention to material culture and archaeological approaches to the study of early and medieval Christianities.

Deborah Justice is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Art and Music Histories at Syracuse University. Her dissertation focuses on American mainline Protestants, music, and conflict, with an analysis of how mostly white groups–historically cornerstones of the American religious landscape–have been using contentious musical practices to embody diversity and (re)cultivate broad cultural and spiritual vitality. In addition to research, she plays a lot of music, mostly Irish and old-time. She is a performing musician and teacher on the hammered dulcimer.