Biography
Dr. Jill Rogers is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Florida’s School of Music. With expertise in disability studies, trauma studies, sound studies, gender & sexuality studies, and cultural studies, Rogers's research centers on how people experience, process, and perform grief and trauma through music and sound, with particular focus on nineteenth through and twenty-first-century classical and popular music cultures in Europe and the United States.
Rogers’s interests in trauma studies, French modernism, affect and psychoanalytic theory, sound studies, and performance studies coalesce in her current book project, Resonant Recoveries: French Music and Trauma Between the Wars, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. This project examined musicians’ personal materials in French and U.S. archives, as well as musical scores, recordings, and philosophical, medical, and military texts in order to offer a new vision of interwar French musical modernism as a set of musical practices that enabled consolation in the wake of World War I’s traumas. Resonant Recoveries is available open access thanks to an IU Presidential Arts & Humanities Production Grant.
Prof. Rogers's work on French music has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Transposition, Revue de musicologie, Music & Letters, as well as the volumes Music and War in Europe from the French Revolution to WWI (ed., Étienne Jardin, Brepols, 2016) and Music and Death (ed., Wolfgang Marx, Boydell & Brewer, 2023). She is currently the Reviews Editor for the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
In recent years Rogers has become a leader in the field of trauma studies as it intersects with music and sound studies. Thanks to support from an IU Presidential Arts & Humanities Conference Hosting Grant and the support of the IU Musicology Department, Rogers hosted and co-organized the international virtual conference, "Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives," at IU in February 2021. As a result of the conference, Rogers, alongside conference co-organizers and co-editors Erin Brooks and Michelle Meinhart, received a contract for a two-volume Oxford Handbook of Music, Sound, and Trauma Studies. She has also co-convened with Maria Cizmic a colloquy entitled "Music, Sound, and Trauma Studies" that is forthcoming in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and she is a co-founder and co-chair of the American Musicological Society's Study Group on Music, Sound, and Trauma Studies.
Rogers is currently working on two book projects that emerge from her work at the intersections of music studies, trauma studies, and intersectional gender and sexuality studies. French Musical Women, Politics, Trauma, and Technology in the Mid-20th-Century draws on archival research to explore how French musical women in popular and classical music spheres utilized music, sound, and technology as ways of negotiating loss, exile, and trauma as well as the national, global, and gender politics between 1930 and 1960. In On the Harm in Harmony: Abuse and Trauma in 20th- and 21st-Century US Musical Institutions – which was supported by a 2023-24 AAUW American Postdoctoral Leave Fellowship – Rogers turns to surveys, interviews, and archival research to investigate how and why abuse has taken place in popular and classical music institutions in the United States from approximately 1900 to present.
Rogers is also a music and sound historian active in digital humanities. While living in Ireland in 2016-19, Rogers founded the Sonic Histories of Cork City Project (SHOCC Project) with Elaine Harrington (University College Cork, special collections librarian) and John Hough (University College Cork, Music Department, senior technical officer). This dynamic public history project, which emerged from an M.A. course in sound studies at UCC, explores relationships between sound, space, and history through historically informed soundscapes created through a by combination of archival research and inventive sound recording and editing. Rogers is also the creator of Sonic Constellations: Circulations of Music, Sound, and Emotion in Interwar France. After receiving an IU Institute of Digital Arts and Humanities, Rogers worked with graduate students to populate two kinds of maps central to this project: 1) ArcGIS-created sound maps that show where and when different sounds and musical performance took place; and 2) social network maps that demonstrate social, emotional, and musical connections between artists, musicians, and writers in interwar France.
Dr. Rogers has a BM in Horn Performance from the University of Denver, an MFA in Musicology from Brandeis University, and a PhD in Musicology from UCLA. Before coming to the University of Florida in 2024, she taught at Indiana University (2019-2024, 2015-16), University College Cork (2016-19), and UCLA (2009-15). She has taught courses and advised projects in French modernism; nineteenth- and twentieth-century music classical music cultures; opera history; instrumental music; music and trauma; music and mourning; music, sound, and violence; disability studies; historical sound studies; music, gender, and sexuality; writing about music; and U.S. and British popular music.
You can find Dr. Rogers’s curriculum vitae here.