University of Chicago
The German-Jewish Reception of Writings on Jewish Music, 1780-1900
Melanie Shahin’s dissertation charts the intellectual history of Jewish music research during its emergence as a distinct field of study in German-speaking lands in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is specifically interested in investigating the ways in which Jewish music scholars associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) movement critically engaged with early modern Christian writings that discuss music in the Bible and Jewish musical practices more broadly. Her research has been supported by the Greenberg Center for Jewish Studies, the Fuerstenberg Fellowship for Jewish Studies, and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes’s Leo Baeck Fellowship for German-Jewish Studies. She also received a FLAS Fellowship to study modern Hebrew in the summer of 2024.
She has secondary research interests in the history of music theory. Her undergraduate research at Fordham University examined how eighteenth-century German music theorists, such as Andreas Werckmeister, Johann Mattheson, and Lorenz Mizler, conceptualized the relationship between music and mathematics, and how these conceptions influenced their self-fashioning as theorists.
Before coming to UChicago, she taught English in Germany for two years on Fulbright and Pädagogischer Austauschdienst grants. In her free time, she enjoys browsing used bookstores, traveling, playing bass, and learning new languages.