Abigail Shupe

Biography

Dr. Abigail Shupe is an associate professor of Music Theory in the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance at Colorado State University. Her primary research focuses on American collective memory, music, and war. Her book was published by Routledge in 2023 and is entitled A Crisis of Collective Memory: War and Death in the Music of George Crumb. In this book, she studied Crumb’s music relating to the Civil War and the American War in Vietnam. For her next project, she is studying the role of music and sound in American collective memory of 9/11 and the American War in Iraq. She has presented on music, media, and war at several national conferences, including the American Musicological Society, the American Studies Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the Society for Military History.

In addition to her study of war, Shupe has studied on the history of music theory and the history of science in the French Enlightenment, focusing especially on experimental science in the theoretical work of Jean-Philippe Rameau. She has published on Rameau and science in Theoria and Indiana Theory Review, and she has presented a hands-on version of Rameau’s experiments at the Rocky Mountain Society for Music Theory and the national Society for Music Theory conference. To recreate these experiments, she has collaborated with CSU alum and Duke University musicology doctoral student Annie Koppes.

Shupe has served as the chairperson for the Society for Music Theory’s Scholars for Social Responsibility Interest Group and for the History of Theory Interest Group, and she has served on the SMT’s Professional Development Committee.

Shupe received her Ph.D. in Music Theory from the University of Western Ontario in 2015, and she holds an M.M. in Music Theory and a B.M. in Composition from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking with her husband and their dog. She swims with the FAST Masters Swim Team in Fort Collins and with the Open Water Lake Swimmers.