Pembroke Center

Ph.D. Musicology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2026

Briana Nave is a musicologist whose research focuses on medical understandings of musical ability. Her planned monograph, Diagnosing Genius, builds on her dissertation research to interrogate the institutional intersections of music and biomedical sciences in the United States around the time of World War I, a pivotal era that catalyzed the medicalization of musical talent. This work examines the fields of psychology, neurology-psychiatry, and musicology to reveal that scientists and music scholars in the early twentieth century came to conceive musical talent as an embodied quality. The work argues that medical scientists understood the ability to make music as a sign of psycho-physiological processes that revealed the interior states of bodies, which were then used to gauge the creative value of those bodies. Giving these ideas medical legitimacy was a means of stratifying a rapidly modernizing and diversifying American society along lines of gender, race, class, and immigration history.

In spring 2027 Nave will offer a seminar on Gender and Creative Genius. In this course, students will closely examine the cultural portrayal of the “genius” figure by bringing a critical eye to fictional or historical people who have been marked by this designation. Through a combination of critical readings and case studies drawn from history, literature, and the arts, the course will parse who is and is not considered a genius to identify the idea’s characteristics and follow the use of that idea in a society that hierarchizes gender, race, and class. This course will trace how the concept has changed over time, and contrast the stereotypical case with prospective genius figures who belong to “othered” groups, including women and queer people, disabled people, and people of color.