Susan Boynton

Susan Boynton has been Director of The University Seminars since January 2023.

She joined the Columbia Department of Music in 2000. Her research and teaching interests include liturgy and music in medieval Western monasticism; manuscript studies; troubadour song; music in the Iberian peninsula; music and childhood, and the history of education; intersections of music with the visual arts; and the history of religion. She has written two books and coedited five volumes, and is currently completing a manuscript on the reception and historiography of the Mozarabic rite in early modern Europe.

Boynton is coeditor (with Diane J. Reilly) of the medieval art history journal Gesta (University of Chicago Press) until the end of 2024. Her articles have appeared in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Speculum, Viator, Traditio, and in other journals and edited volumes representing several different humanities disciplines. Boynton’s research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy in Rome, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and Trinity College Dublin’s Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

In 2020, Boynton was named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, an honor awarded by the Prime Minister of France on the recommendation of the Minister of Education. Boynton is also a recipient of Columbia’s Distinguished Faculty Award.