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Visiting Assistant Professor
Ph.D., University of Minnesota
Fields: 17 th - and 18 th -Century Music, Sound Studies, Opera, Popular Music, Philosophy
Email: jnelson@holycross.edu
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Biography

Joseph V. Nelson, Visiting Professor of Music, specializes in music of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries and his work draws from sound studies, Shakespeare studies, art history,
disability studies, and continental philosophy. His dissertation is entitled, “’Bless Us All, ‘Tis a
Mad World’: Mad Tom o’ Bedlam, Music, and the Politics of Noise in Seventeenth-Century
London.” As an emerging scholar, he has developed a reputation for his work on the topics of
music and madness, popular broadside ballads, seventeenth-century street culture in London,
and early modern sound studies. He has a secondary research interest in popular music.

Dr. Nelson has published his work in Musical Spaces: Place, Performance, and Power (Taylor &
Francis, 2022) and Belonging and Detachment: Representing Musical Identity in Visual Culture
(Duke University Press, 2022). He has presented his work at national and international
conferences, including the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, Renaissance
Society of America, Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, Society for Musicology in Ireland,
Association Répertoire Internationale d’Iconographie Musicale, International Association for
the Study of Popular Music – Canada, Music and the Moving Image, Royal Music Association
Shakespeare and Music Study Group, and the biennial meeting of the North American British
Music Studies Association. His current projects include a chapter for Routledge Companion to
Early Modern Music and Literature on Moll Cutpurse from Dekker and Middleton’s The Roaring
Girl (1611) and an article for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture on the musical and sonic
geography of eighteenth-century Covent Garden Market.

As a countertenor, Dr. Nelson roles include Thyrsis in Gagliano’s La Dafne, Oberon in Britten’s A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, and his concert repertoire includes Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, J.S.
Bach’s Magnificat and Mass in B minor, and Handel’s Messiah. He attended the Aspen Music
Festival’s Opera Theater Center and the Oberlin University Baroque Performance Institute. His
teachers included Elizabeth Mannion and Patrice Michaels.

Joseph Nelson holds a B.A. in Music and Gender Studies (double major) from Lawrence
University, an M.M. in Vocal Performance from the Chicago College of the Performing Arts, and
an M.A. in Musicology from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in Musicology with a
doctoral minor in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, working with Kelley Harness,
Gabriela Currie, Sumanth Gopinath, and David Grayson.