Catherine Gordon-Seifert is an associate professor of music, Chairperson of the Music Department at Providence College , a musicologist, and a professional harpsichordist. She studied harpsichord with Edward Parmentier at the University of Michigan , Gustav Leonhardt in the Netherlands , and Peter Sykes in Boston and continues to perform as a soloist and with ensembles The Elective Affinities and a.m.p. baroque. She earned an undergraduate degree in music education and harpsichord performance from Bowling State University, a Masters degree in harpsichord performance from Indiana University , and a Masters and Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Michigan . Professor Gordon-Seifert is an active scholar and has participated in several musicological organizations in leadership positions on the international, national, and regional levels. Most recently, she serves as national secretary for the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music (SSCM) and as AMS-New England Chapter Representative.  She also served as past president of the AMS-NE. She has presented papers on many occasions at the national conference of the American Musicological Society , the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, the Historical Keyboard Society, the International Conference on Baroque Music, the International Musicological Society Conference, a special conference devoted to the music of Sébastien de Brossard sponsored by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles in France, and Eros and Euterpe, a conference on music and eroticism sponsored by Indiana University. She has received a variety of research grants, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, a French government research fellowship from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and a grant from the Providence College Aid to Faculty Research.  In 2006, she was awarded the American Musicological Society ’s Noah Greenberg Award, along with Elisabeth Belgrano and Stephen Stubbs, to make a CD of airs by Bénigne de Bacilly.

Her primary field of scholarship focuses on late seventeenth-century French airs or "courtly" love songs. Her dissertation explored rhetoric as the basis of conventional expressions of emotional states in French airs, published during the 1660s, and is an interdisciplinary work that incorporates the fields of rhetoric, poetics, aesthetics, social and cultural history, the science and physiology of "the passions of the soul," music theory, and performance practices.   Her most recent publications include:

'Precious' Eroticism and Hidden Morality: Salon Culture and the Mid-Seventeenth-Century French Air."  In Eros and Euterpe: Eroticism in Early Modern Music.  Edited by Massimo Ossi.  Oxford University Press.  Forthcoming.

"The Allemandes of Louis Couperin:  Songs Without Words."  In Fiori musicali-Liber Amicorum Alexander Silbiger.  Warren, MI:  Harmonie Park Press, 2008.  Forthcoming. 
 
"From Impurity to Piety: Mid 17th-Century French Devotional Airs and the Spiritual Conversion of Women."  The Journal of Musicology 22/2 (2005): 268-291.

"Strong  Men -- Weak Women:  Gender Representation and the Influence of Lully's 'Operatic Style' on French Airs Sérieux (1650-1700)" In Musical Voices of Early Modern Women:  Many-Headed Melodies.   Edited by Thomasin LaMay, 135-167. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005, 135-167.

"Lambert, Michel." In Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (MGG), Biographical Encyclopedia. Volume 13. Bärenreiter und Metzler, 2004, 1092-1094.

"The Heroism Undone: The Erotic Manuscript Parodies of Lully/Quinault Tragédies Lyriques."  In Music, Sensation, and Sensuality.  Edited by Linda Austern, 137-166. Garland Press, 2001.

"'La Réplique Galante': Sébastien de Brossard's Airs as Conversation."  In Sébastien Brossard, Musicien.  Edited by Jean Duron, 181-201.  Versailles:  Editions du Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles (Editions Klincksieck), 1998.

Professor Gordon-Seifert is currently working on a book entitled Music and the Language of Love in the Seventeenth-Century French Airs, 1650-1700.  She lives in Providence , RI , with her husband, Lewis Seifert, a professor of French literature at Brown University , and her two sons, Andrew and Patrick.