Mary Simonson

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Mary Simonson

Daniel C. Benton '80 Endowed Chair in Arts, Creativity, and Innovation; Professor of Film & Media Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Department/Office Information

Women's Studies, Film and Media Studies

Contact

(315) 228-6359

Mary Simonson is the Daniel C. Benton ’80 Endowed Chair in Arts, Creativity, and Innovation and Professor of Film and Media Studies and Women’s Studies at Colgate University. She completed her doctorate in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia.  Her scholarship explores performance across media in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, particularly in American filmic, musical, and cultural contexts. Her book, Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment, 1907-1917 (Oxford University Press, 2013) examines the interplay of the live and the mediatized in turn-of-the-century American musical, dance, and film cultures, and her current book project examines vocal performance and technologies in American silent films and their exhibition in the 1920s. Her work has also appeared in journals and edited volumes including the Journal of the American Musicological Society, American Music, and the Journal of the Society for American Music. She serves on the Council of the American Musicological Society and chairs the Society for American Music’s Music, Sound, and Media Interest Group; she also recently concluded a term as the president of the New York State-St. Lawrence Chapter of the American Musicological Society, and is co-founder and co-chair of the Mellon Humanities Corridor Performance/History Faculty Working Group. She frequently leads Colgate's Film and Media Studies-focused New York City Study Group, as well as an immersive experience at the Cannes Film Festival in collaboration with the Gotham Film & Media Institute.

 

BA, Rutgers University
MA, University of Virginia
PhD, University of Virginia

  • University of Virginia (2006-2007)
  • University of California, Los Angeles (2007-2008)

Film music, American cinema, performance studies, 19th- and 20th-century opera and dance, American popular entertainment

Book

Body Knowledge: Performance, Intermediality, and American Entertainment at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, October 2013.  

Articles and Chapters

“Intermediality and Liveness at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality, ed. Jørgen Bruhn, Asum López-Varela Azcárate, and Miriam de Paiva Vieira. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2023.

“Touring the Screen: Cinematic Resonances of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes,” American Music 39, no. 4 (Winter 2021): 468-493.

With Samuel N. Dorf, “The Ballets Russes in America,” American Music 39, no. 4 (Winter 2021): 399-408.

“Finding Meaning in Intermedial Gaps,” in Beyond Media Borders: Intermedial Relations among Multimodal Media, edited by Lars Elleström. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020.

“  ‘Adding to the Pictures’: The American Film Prologue in the 1920s,” American Music 37, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 1-28.

“Visualizing Music in the Silent Era: The Collaborative Experiments of Visual Symphony Productions,” Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 1 (February 2018): 2-36.

“Dance Pictures: The Cinematic Experiments of Anna Pavlova and Rita Sacchetto,” Screening the Past 40 (September 2015).

“A Different Kind of Ballet:  Rereading Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance,” in Mediated Moves: A Popular Screen Dance Reader, edited by Melissa Blanco Borelli.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

“Dancing the Future, Performing the Past: Isadora Duncan and Wagnerism in the American Imagination,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 511-555.

“Screening the Diva,” in The Arts of the Prima Donna in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Hilary Poriss and Rachel Cowgill. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

“Creating Knowledge:  Feminist Scholarship as Activism,” in Leading the Way: Young Women’s Activism for Social Change, edited by Mary K. Trigg.  New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009.

“The Call of Salome:  American Adaptations and Recreations of the Female Body,” Women and Music 11 (2007), 1-16.

Catalog Essays

“Ballettens Datter (1913): Rita Sacchetto,” Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Catalogue, Limited 39th Edition, 2020, 41-44.

Reviews

Review of Marian Wilson Kimber, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). Journal of the American Musicological Society 72, no. 1 (April 2019): 251-255.

Review of Carrie J. Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Dance Chronicle 36 (2013): 118-122.

Review of Annie J. Randall and Rosalind Grey Davis, Puccini and the Girl:  History and Reception of The Girl of the Golden West (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004).  Notes (August 2006): 110-112.

Review of Maria Pini, Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity:  The Move from Home to House (New York:  Palgrave, 2001).   Women and Music 8 (2004): 86-92.

  • President, New York State-Saint Lawrence Chapter of the American Musicological Society, 2021-present
  • Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award Committee, Society for American Music, 2023-present
  • Co-convenor, Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor CNY Experimental Media Consortium Working Group, May 2023-present
  • Chair of the  Conference committee (program and local arrangements), New York State-Saint  Lawrence Chapter of the American Musicological Soociety, 2021
  • Virgil Thomson Fellowship Award Committee, Society foor American Music, 2015-2019
  • Convenor, Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor "Performance/History" Working Group, January 2014-present
  • Steering Committee, Women and Film History International, October 2014-June 2017
  • Liaison to the Flaherty Film Seminar, Spring 2014-Spring 2022
  • Principal Organizer, "The Performing Body in the Hollywood Film Musical: An Interdisciplinary Symposium," April 2013
  • Chair, Music, Sound, and Media Interest Group, Society for American Music, 2008-present
  • Member, American Musicological Society; Society for American Music; Dance Studies Association; Society for Cinema  and Media Studies; Women and Film History International
  •  
  • New York Public Library Short-Term Research Fellow, 2014-15
  • Finalist, The Society of American Music's H. Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award, 2007
  • University of Virginia Dissertation-Year Fellow
  • University of Virginia Presidential Fellow
  • The American Musicological Society's Lowens' Award for Graduate Student Research, 2003
  • Phi Beta Kappa