Alison DeSimone is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where she teaches courses in music of the Renaissance and the Baroque, opera history, and specializes in eighteenth-century topics. She has published a co-edited essay collection called Music and the Benefit Performance in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2019) and is currently working on a monograph entitled The Power of Pastiche: Musical Miscellany and the Creation of Cultural Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century London (forthcoming, Clemson University Press). This latter study considers how different types of musical miscellany (including early public concerts, pasticcio operas, published songbooks, compositional styles, and music criticism) helped the British shape their cultural and musical tastes as London grew into a cosmopolitan capital in the early eighteenth century.
DeSimone holds a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from the University of Michigan (2013). Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the American Handel Society, the Handel Institute, and the University of Missouri Research Board, among others. She has also published widely, with articles in the A-R Online Anthology, American Handel Society Newsletter, Händel-Jahrbuch, and Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her article in Early Modern Women, “Equally Charming, Equally Too Great: Female Rivalry, Politics, and Opera in temprano Eighteenth-Century London,” won the 2018 Ruth Solie Prize for an Outstanding Article on British Music from the North American British Music Studies Association. She is also currently an Associate Editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and is formerly the editor for the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music Newsletter (2015–18). She serves as treasurer of AMS Midwest and as a board member for the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music. The University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory recognized her in 2017, when she won the Faculty Excellence Award. She is also active as a harpsichordist in and around Kansas City.
