Cristina Fava

Maria Cristina Fava is an associate professor of musicology at Western Michigan University. She obtained a bachelor in music performance (clarinet) at the Conservatory of Music in Trento, Italy. Thereafter, she completed master degrees in music history and ethnomusicology, in 2002 and 2004 respectively, at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). In 2012, she graduated with a Ph.D. in Musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

Her research considers various contexts of American music during the twentieth century, including the intersections of music and politics that characterized the Great Depression Era and the effects of McCarthyism on film music composers. Her book Art Music Activism: Aesthetics and Politics in 1930s New York City, is in production at the University of Illinois Press and will be available in early 2024. She has published articles in Musica/Realtà, Musica Docta, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, and American Music, and contributed the chapter “Bernstein and Blitzstein” to the book Bernstein in Context edited by Elizabeth Wells for Cambridge University Press (2023).

Before joining the faculty at WMU, Fava taught at the Eastman School of Music and at Michigan State University.