Biography
Joseph V. Nelson serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at the »»ÆÞÂÛ̳. His research focuses on music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and draws from the fields of Sound Studies, Shakespeare Studies, Art History, Disability Studies, and continental philosophy. His current book project, With Thund’ring Voices and Shattered Aires: Music, Madness, and Violence in Seventeenth-Century England, examines the intersection between musical depictions of madness, everyday experiences of poverty and disease, and how reception of mad songs and madmen on the stage reflected anxieties and lived experiences of political violence before and after the English Civil War. The book proposes that the context of characters such as King Lear and Mad Tom o’ Bedlam in staged works with direct political themes and the lingering of ballads for such characters in popular street literature well into the eighteenth century point toward deep anxieties of the upper classes around threats of violence. It examines courtly dance, folk and rural music, popular ballads, street pamphlet literature, and visual art to show how pervasive this attitude was and how its lingering effects included things like laws around begging or the regulation of street musicians. Dr. Nelson has already published other research on the sonic geography of eighteenth-century Covent Garden Market in London and the different forms of gender- and class-inscribed musical labor and spaces defined by that labor, such as the tavern, the opera house, and street corners. His secondary area of research is in popular music and queer masculinities and he has presented his research on queer vocal intimacy in the television show Schitt’s Creek at several national and international conferences.
Dr. Nelson’s recent publications include a forthcoming chapter in the Routledge Companion to Early Modern Music and Literature on Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s play The Roaring Girl (1611) about a cross-dressing female gangster that was based on the real-life pickpocket Mary Frith. He also has an article in the journal Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (2024) and chapters in the essay collections Belonging and Detachment: Representing Musical Identity in Visual Culture (2023) and Musical Spaces: Place, Performance, and Power (2022). He has presented at numerous national and international conferences, including meetings of the American Musicological Society, Renaissance Society of America, Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, North American British Music Studies Association, the Handel Institute in London, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Association Répertoire Internationale d’Iconographie Musicale, Society for Musicology in Ireland, International Association for the Study of Popular Music – Canada, Music and the Moving Image, the Early Modern Soundscapes Research Network, and the Shakespeare and Music Study Group of the Royal Music Association. This summer he will present his work at the European Shakespeare Research Association’s international congress in Portugal. He was recently awarded the Linda Shaver-Gleason Award from the North American British Music Studies Association for his current contributions and future contributions to the field of British Music Studies. His research has been supported by grants from the Handel Institute, Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library, and the School of Music Travel Award from the University of Minnesota. He has also written the program notes for the past three summer seasons of the Central City Opera in Colorado.
As an active performer, Dr. Nelson debuted as a tenor in recital at the Pryor Performing Arts Center at the »»ÆÞÂÛ̳. He has also performed as a countertenor with repertoire including Thyrsis in Galgiano’s La Dafne for the Twin Cities Early Music Festival, Oberon in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the University of Minnesota, and Zotico (cover) in the North American premiere of Cavalli’s Egliogabalo under the baton of Jane Glover at the Aspen Music Festival’s Opera Theater Center. His concert repertoire ranges from the baroque to twentieth-century art song and includes Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, J.S. Bach’s Magnificat and Mass in B Minor, and Handel’s Messiah. He also spent several summers at the Oberlin University Baroque Performance Institute where he worked with Max van Egmond. His teachers included Elizabeth Mannion and Patrice Michaels.
Dr. Nelson holds a Ph.D. in Musicology with a doctoral minor in Comparative Studies from the University of Minnesota, an M.A. in Musicology from the University of Minnesota, an M.M. in Vocal Performance from the Chicago College of the Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, and a B.A. with a double major in Music and Gender Studies from Lawrence University.