Jessica Sternfeld, Ph.D.

Dr. Jessica Sternfeld joins the faculty of Chapman University after relocating from the east coast, where most recently she served as Assistant Professor of Music (tenure track) and head of the Music History Division in the Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance at Rhode Island College.  Her work with students, whether music majors, grad students, or non-majors, focuses on grounding each musical piece in its context, exploring not only the music but its meaning, audience, and cultural significance.  Some of her courses include musical theater on stage and film; opera; American popular music and song; political and social movements in music; and the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern eras of Western art music. 

Wesleyan University granted Dr. Sternfeld a B.A. with honors in music, with focuses in music history and choral conducting.  She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton University in 2002, where her graduate studies included opera and culture, specialized topics in Western art music, and gender studies across disciplines.

Her book, The Megamusical (2006, Indiana University Press), is the first to explore the phenomenon of the blockbuster musicals of the last thirty years.  It discusses both the internal workings and the external cultural features of the “megamusical.”  She also contributed a new chapter to the second edition (2008) of the Cambridge Companion to the Musical, on the subject of musical revivals, films, television productions, and recordings.  With theater scholar Elizabeth Wollman, she co-wrote the chapter “After the ‘Golden Age’” for the book Keywords for the American Musical on Stage and Screen (2009).  She has also authored numerous other chapters and articles (including a forthcoming piece on Damn Yankees and the culture of the 1950s, and another on the texts and contexts of Rent) and delivered several national conference papers.  She is an active member of the Society for American Music, the American Musicological Society, and the College Music Society. 

Among her previous posts, Dr. Sternfeld taught academic writing in the Princeton University Writing Program, and continues to work with students on writing, no matter the musical topic.  She was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University, and has also held teaching posts in the music departments at the University of Pittsburgh, Duke University, and California State University, Long  Beach.  She is a member of the Editorial Board of the American Music Research Center Journal and is serving as a Guest Editor of a special edition of the journal Studies in Musical Theatre.  Besides her work in musicology and music history, Dr. Sternfeld is a trained classical and theater singer, and enjoys choral singing and conducting as well as musical theater directing and coaching of composers, lyricists, and performers.