The Musicology department of the Peabody Conservatory will welcome two new faculty members in 2023 with the addition of Remi Chiu and Qingfan Jiang. Chiu will serve as Chair of the department.
A musicologist specializing in Renaissance music and the history of medicine, Remi Chiu is the author of Plague and Music in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press). His research into the music of past epidemics has yielded some unexpected insights into music-making under COVID-19, some of which have been featured in The Guardian and on NPR, PBS, and Pitchfork, among other outlets. He has published articles on music, sound, and COVID in Frontiers in Psychology and Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques; the former surveys the musical responses to epidemics across epochs, and the latter analyzes the role and ethics of bell-ringing rituals in shaping our understanding of and responses to the pandemic. Chiu is a pianist and earned his PhD in musicology from McGill University. Prior to joining Peabody, he taught at the University of Toronto and Loyola University Maryland.
Qingfan Jiang is a musicologist specializing in global music history. Her research focuses on the musical exchange between China and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her book project, Missionaries, Music, and the Making of a Global Enlightenment, explores the Sino-Western musical dialogue facilitated by the Jesuit missionaries and how this dialogue contributed to the emergence of the Enlightenment as a global intellectual movement. Her 2022 article on the influence of Chinese Music in the theoretical works of Rameau and Rousseau appeared in Eighteenth-Century Music. An article on a new approach to teaching global music history will appear in the Routledge series Modern Musicology and the College Classroom. Before joining Peabody, Jiang held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University. She earned her PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University.
Chiu and Jiang join a Musicology faculty at the Peabody Conservatory whose specialties span the history of notated Western music and involve many subdisciplines in the field of musicology. They play an integral role in the education of Peabody students, providing rigorous, personalized, supportive instruction to help students excel academically and professionally.
