I am a musicologist and philosopher with particular interests in the musical culture of the Renaissance and the history of Western musical aesthetics. Previously I was Assistant Professor at Ca’Foscari the University of Venice. I completed my doctoral studies at Utrecht University in 2009, followed by a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Global Research Fellowship at Warwick University. I have received grants and fellowships from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Newberry Library, the Max Planck Institute, and the Herzog August Library. 

My research originates from my fascination with two ancient musical doctrines that have enchanted European scholars and musicians for centuries: the presence of harmony in the cosmos and the power of music to affect and transform human beings.This fascination inspired me to in-depth research into the reception history of these ideas in the Renaissance and beyond, exploring issues of universal harmony; affections, imitation and expression; the history of the human soul, body, emotions and the sense of hearing, and practices of musical ethos and musical healing. The interaction between these theories and Renaissance and Baroque music has also always been a focal point of my research. As a professional recorder player, I use the results of my research as a source of inspiration for the contemporary performance practice of early music. I have also worked on the reception of the musical humanism of the Renaissance in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in particular on its influence on Carl Gustav Jung and Oliver Sacks. 

I am the author of the monograph Echoes of an Invisible World: Marsilio Ficino and Francesco Patrizi on Cosmic Order and Music Theory (2014). I am editor of Harmonisch Labyrint: De muziek van de kosmos in de westerse wereld (2007), Sing Aloud Harmonious Spheres: Renaissance Conceptions of Cosmic Harmony (2017), The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind, and Well-being (2018), and The Legacy of Plato’s Timaeus: Cosmology, Music, Medicine, and Architecture from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (2024). I served as international cooperation co-ordinator at the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group of King’s College London and as acquisitions editor on the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Keywords

Musical cultures in Renaissance and early modern Europe, classical reception history, history of philosophy, science and ethics, medical humanities, history of universal harmony, history of the human soul, body, emotions, sense of hearing and music therapy; early music performance and research.