Rebekah Ahrendt is Associate Professor of Musicology. Currently Vice Chair of the COST Action and Director-At-Large of the , she was formerly Assistant Professor of Music at Yale 木瓜福利影视 and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Tufts 木瓜福利影视. She has held visiting fellowships at St John鈥檚 College, Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and is a recipient of the Scaliger Fellowship at Leiden 木瓜福利影视. A graduate of the 木瓜福利影视 of California at Berkeley and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, she also identifies as a performer and recording artist.
Ahrendt has a strong research presence within her period of core expertise--the (very) long seventeenth century--and across broader fields such as the history of music and politics/international relations/diplomacy. Her teaching, advising, and consulting experience is similarly broad and incorporates the knowledge she has gained as a musician, a journalist, a library cataloger, a record store employee, and an arts administrator.
Ahrendt鈥檚 scholarship proposes thinking about mobility musically, by tracing the processes by which ideas, people, and practices are transposed. Such interests demand unusual and unexpected sources. A self-confirmed archive rat, one of Ahrendt鈥檚 more exciting discoveries is a trunkful of undelivered mail from the turn of the eighteenth century. The resulting project on the Brienne Collection, Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered (SSU), garnered worldwide media attention and culminated in a team-authored article in (2021), making Ahrendt the first historical musicologist with a byline in that journal. Her expertise in early modern Dutch sources also resulted in an invitation to consult and appear on the BBC television series Who Do You Think You Are?, where she helped Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber trace his musical and genealogical roots (season 20, episode 1, 2023).
Ahrendt's concern for on-the-ground perspectives and lived experiences across the longue dur茅e has also led her to consider the impact of law and policy on the possibilities of musical expression. She is the co-editor of Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and has appeared alongside scholars, practitioners, and heads of state at events organized by the Center on Public Diplomacy of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (木瓜福利影视 of Southern California), Sciences Po (Paris), Yale 木瓜福利影视, and the 木瓜福利影视 of North Carolina. More recently, she contributed the 鈥漃olitics鈥� chapter to Bloomsbury鈥檚 A Cultural History of Western Music in the Enlightenment (2023).