Muhlenberg college

Assistant Professor
Department of Music
Baker Center for the Arts, 230
484.664.4012
khiles@muhlenberg.edu

Education:

Ph.D., Historical Musicology (awarded distinction), Columbia University, 2009
M.Phil., Historical Musicology, Columbia University, 2005
M.F.A., Musicology, Brandeis University, 2003
B.A., Music & English Literature, Swarthmore College, 1999

Courses:

Introduction to Music (MUS 101)
Music History I: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque (MUS 221)
Music History II: Classic, Romantic, 20th & 21st Centuries (MUS 222)
American Music (MUS 226)
Opera (MUS 227)
Pop, Rock & Soul Music in the United States (MUS 287)
Global Pop (MUS 288)
Haydn & Mozart (MUS 322)
Music Senior Seminar (MUS 480)
FYS: Disney Worlds

Dr. Hiles joined the Muhlenberg faculty in 2009 and teaches courses in music history and the cultural study of music. A specialist in eighteenth-century music, her research focuses on Vienna and Joseph Haydn. She is particularly interested in the diverse political and social roles for music during wartime. Her dissertation, “Haydn’s Heroic Decades: Music, Politics, and War, 1791–1809,” explores this topic in Vienna during the 1790s and 1800s. Other research interests include opera, medieval liturgical books, Tin Pan Alley popular song, and film music.

Dr. Hiles has been awarded research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Whiting Foundation, and the American Musicological Society (AMS). She spent the 2010/2011 academic year on research leave from Muhlenberg as a Mellon/ACLS Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellow at the UC Davis Humanities Institute in California. In 2008/2009 she was an ACLS Dissertation Fellow and an honorary Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellow.

She has presented her research at many conferences, including the national meeting of the AMS (2009), the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2008, 2009, 2010, 2012), a joint meeting of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music and the Haydn Society of North America (2008), as well as the International Congress on Medieval Studies (2005). She served as editor-in-chief of the journal Current Musicology and has contributed reviews to Eighteenth-Century Studies, Eighteenth-Century Music, and Notes (the quarterly journal of the Music Library Association). She currently serves on the Mozart Society of America Board of Directors.

Trained as a pianist and violinist, Dr. Hiles has more recently taken up the viola and plays the instrument she built in Carmel Valley, California, in 1999. She was a historical consultant on Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette and in the summers works in Europe as an expert guide on the Tauck Company’s music-themed cruise along the Danube River. She grew up in Monterey, California.

Selected Publications:

“Papageno: An Awakening of the Poetics and Ethics of Desire,” In Kierkegaard Research, vol. 16, co-authored with Marcia Morgan (Muhlenberg Department of Philosophy), Ashgate, in press.

Instructor’s Manual: The Story of Opera, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2013.

Review of War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime, Mary A. Favret (Indiana, 2010). Eighteenth-Century Studies 44/4 (2011): 548–51.

Review of The String Quartets of Joseph Haydn, Floyd Grave and Margaret Grave, (Oxford, 2006). Eighteenth-Century Music 6/1 (2009): 120–23.