Overview
Samantha is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology with a secondary field in German studies. Her interdisciplinary research revolves around the intersection of music and literature in Austro-German works of the 19th and 20th centuries, including music-text relations, Literaturoper, and music in literature, and engages with aesthetics, critical theory, and media theory. She is currently writing her dissertation on questions of communicability in three musical adaptations of texts by Franz Kafka: Ernst Krenek’s 1938 song cycle, Fünf Lieder nach Worten von Franz Kafka, Hans Werner Henze’s 1951 radio opera, Ein Landarzt, and Gottfried von Einem’s 1953 staged opera, Der Prozeß. In her examination of these adaptations, she pursues three interweaving perspectives on musical communication: the politics and ethics of music amid pressing concerns of wartime devastation and postwar reconstruction; the unique and/or overlapping powers of musical and linguistic expression; and the mediality of musical transmission.
Samantha graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a joint degree in music and comparative literature, and received a 2016-2017 Fulbright Grant to conduct archival research on Gottfried von Einem’s literary operas at the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, Austria. While at Cornell, her work has been supported by the Manon Michels Einaudi Grant and the Michele Sicca Research Grant, and she has presented papers at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association and on opera in popular culture. As an instructor of record, Samantha has designed and led courses on music in film and Goethe’s Faust in music, the latter as a 2022-2023 Don M. Randel Teaching Fellow.