This January found Edward Jacobson (class of ’13) back on campus as part of a visit to Chicago to present his research at a joint meeting of the Modern Language Association and the American Historical Association. This was the latest in a series of international conference presentations that Edward has given during his time in graduate school, including two meetings of the American Musicological Society (2016: Vancouver, BC; 2018: San Antonio, TX), the Biennial International Conference on 19th-century Music (2014: Toronto, ON; 2016: Oxford, UK; 2018: Huddersfield, UK), and the Transnational Opera Studies Conference (2017: Bern, CH).
Edward is a PhD candidate in musicology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also received his MA degree in 2015; he is currently completing a dissertation on opera and literature in early nineteenth-century Italy. He graduated summa cum laude from Notre Dame in 2013, having spent his junior year at New College, Oxford through Notre Dame’s study abroad program. His undergraduate work in the Department of Music prepared him to enter Berkeley directly after graduation, an increasingly rare achievement when many top graduate schools prefer students to earn a master’s degree before accepting students for PhD programs.
“While many universities are cutting back on undergraduate requirements, I am grateful to Notre Dame for preserving its thorough and rigorous survey of all of Western art music, which I have relied on every day as a graduate student and teaching assistant,” he said. “I am also grateful for Notre Dame’s commitment to music theory, which has given me a competitive advantage over many of my peers from even the most prestigious undergraduate programs.”
In addition to these conference papers, Edward has a review published in Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge University Press) and a forthcoming essay in a volume edited by Roger Parker and Roberta Montemorra Marvin. He is also this year’s winner of Notre Dame Magazine’s Young Alumni Essay Contest. His winning contribution can be read here.