Giulia Accornero

Giulia Accornero joins the FAS as Assistant Professor in the Department of Music. Her research combines the history of music theory and media studies, focusing on early Arabic music theory and the ways it shapes past and present discourse in Europe and North America. She also examines how new and old media—including music notation, amplification techniques, and music production software—predicate new modes of listening to music and identifying its elements. She is currently working on her first book, Tools of the Trade: Measuring Music in the Greater Mediterranean (850-1350), which investigates the cultural, cognitive, and material practices through which medieval music theorists from Baghdad to Paris made sense of musical time. Her second book-length project, Theorizing from the Temperate Zone: A Tale of Music and Climate Theory, takes the musical discourse of premodern Islamicate authors as a springboard to trace the genealogy of ‘climatic determinism’—the ideology that climate determines the physical attributes and mental characteristics of individuals, giving rise to racial difference. 

Before arriving at Yale, Accornero obtained her PhD in Music Theory at Harvard University and served as a Graduate Fellow at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa i Tatti. Prior to that, she completed a Bachelor and Master of Arts in Musicology from the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi of Milan, and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Università Bocconi in Milan.