Rebekah Ahrendt is Associate Professor of Musicology. Currently Vice Chair of the COST Action EarlyMuse and Director-At-Large of the International Musicological Society, she was formerly Assistant Professor of Music at Yale University and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Tufts University. She has held visiting fellowships at St John’s College, Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, and is a recipient of the Scaliger Fellowship at Leiden University. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, she also identifies as a performer and recording artist. 

Ahrendt has a strong research presence within her period of core expertise--the (very) long seventeenth century--and across broader fields such as the history of music and politics/international relations/diplomacy. Her teaching, advising, and consulting experience is similarly broad and incorporates the knowledge she has gained as a musician, a journalist, a library cataloger, a record store employee, and an arts administrator. 

Ahrendt’s scholarship proposes thinking about mobility musically, by tracing the processes by which ideas, people, and practices are transposed. Such interests demand unusual and unexpected sources. A self-confirmed archive rat, one of Ahrendt’s more exciting discoveries is a trunkful of undelivered mail from the turn of the eighteenth century. The resulting project on the Brienne Collection, Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered (SSU), garnered worldwide media attention and culminated in a team-authored article in Nature Communications (2021), making Ahrendt the first historical musicologist with a byline in that journal. Her expertise in early modern Dutch sources also resulted in an invitation to consult and appear on the BBC television series Who Do You Think You Are?, where she helped Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber trace his musical and genealogical roots (season 20, episode 1, 2023).

Ahrendt's concern for on-the-ground perspectives and lived experiences across the longue durée has also led her to consider the impact of law and policy on the possibilities of musical expression. She is the co-editor of Music and Diplomacy from the Early Modern Era to the Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and has appeared alongside scholars, practitioners, and heads of state at events organized by the Center on Public Diplomacy of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism (University of Southern California), Sciences Po (Paris), Yale University, and the University of North Carolina. More recently, she contributed the ”Politics” chapter to Bloomsbury’s A Cultural History of Western Music in the Enlightenment (2023).