Kristin M. Franseen (PhD Musicology, McGill) is a 2021-2023 FRQSC postdoctoral fellow. Her research centers on the place of identity, gossip, and fiction in the histories of musicology, music theory, and music biography.
Her current project “Memories of a Musicologist: Listening, Musical Nostalgia, and Sexuality in Edward Prime-Stevenson’s Repertory” considers the late work of the eccentric US music critic and amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson (1858-1942). While better known today for his contributions to early gay literary history through the novel Imre: A Memorandum (ca. 1905) and The Intersexes: A History of Simisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (ca. 1908/9), Prime-Stevenson’s last two known books on musical subjects (Long-Haired Iopas: Old Chapters from Twenty-Five Years of Music Criticism (1927) and A Repertory of One Hundred Musical Programmes (1932)) reflect an attempt to bring together his early career as a music journalist with a lifetime of personal nostalgia, research and gossip about the history of sexuality, and changing approaches to listening to opera and symphonic music. This project revaluates Prime-Stevenson’s place in the history of queer musicology and music theory, with a particular focus on reconstructing his research process and intended (and, in some cases, imagined) readership.
Kristin has previously taught courses in music history and appreciation, research methods, and music and gender at McGill University, the University of Ottawa, and Carleton University. Her secondary research interests include depictions of female philosophers in 18th-century opera, early metronome advertising, and the intersections of literature and biography in Antonio Salieri’s reception history. She is also a research associate at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute.
