Elizabeth Weinfield

Elizabeth Weinfield is a music historian whose research explores the relationships among gender, performance, and race in the early modern period. Her interests include music by women in the crypto-Jewish communities of Antwerp, music in the 17th-century Constantinople harem, performance practice, and the early music revival in America. A native New Yorker, she holds a PhD in historical musicology from the Graduate Center (CUNY), an MSt in music from Oxford, and a BA in art history from Rutgers. She previously taught music history at City College, Fordham, and Yeshiva. Weinfield has served as the editor of the digital publication the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as a researcher at the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments. Founder and artistic director of the ensemble Sonnambula, Weinfield has designed site-specific concerts at the Met Museum, the Cloisters, the Hispanic Society, the Frick, and recently published the first complete recording of the music of the 17th-century composer, Leonora Duarte (Centaur Records, 2019). Her writing on old instruments and historical performance has been published in the Galpin Society Journal, the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, and the Huffington Post, Fortnight Journal; is forthcoming in the Journal of Musicology; and with Cambridge University Press. She is working on her first book, Leonora Duarte (1610–1678), Converso Composer in Antwerp: An Early-Modern Feminist Identity, a monograph on Duarte that investigates music’s role in the convergence of business and culture in the early modern domestic space.