Our Director

Since joining the faculty of the Columbia Department of Music in 2000, Susan Boynton has been a member of The University Seminar on Medieval Studies, which she chaired from 2007-17. She joined the Advisory Board (now Executive Committee) of The University Seminars in 2012 and has co-chaired The University Seminar on Religion and Writing since 2021. Boynton’s research and teaching interests include liturgy and music in medieval Western monasticism; manuscript studies; music in the Iberian peninsula; troubadour song; music and childhood, and the history of education; intersections of music with the visual arts; and the history of religion. She is the author of three books. The first, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000-1125 (2006), won the Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society. Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain (2011), won the Society’s Robert M. Stevenson Award. Her third monograph, Liturgy of Empire: The Reception of the Mozarabic Rite in Early Modern Europe, will appear in the fall of 2025.

Boynton has coedited seven volumes of essays. With the art historian Diane J. Reilly, Boynton coedited The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages (2011) and Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound (2015), which won the American Musicological Society’s Ruth A. Solie Award. Boynton’s other coedited volumes include From Dead of Night to End of Day: The Medieval Customs of Cluny (2005), with Isabelle Cochelin; Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth (2006), with Roe-Min Kok; Young Choristers, 650-1700 (2008), with Eric Rice; A Cultural History of Religion: The Middle Ages (forthcoming) with Louis I. Hamilton.

From 2017-2024, Boynton was coeditor (with Diane J. Reilly) of the medieval art history journal Gesta (University of Chicago Press). Her articles have appeared in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Speculum, Viator, Traditio, and in other journals and edited volumes representing several different humanities disciplines. Boynton’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy in Rome, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the French American Cultural Exchange Foundation, and Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

In 2020, Boynton was named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, an honor awarded by the Prime Minister of France on the recommendation of the Minister of Education. In 2024, she was elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. Boynton is also a recipient of Columbia’s Distinguished Faculty Award.