Virginia E. Whealton

Virginia E. Whealton is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at Texas Tech University. She holds a Bachelor of Music in Violin Performance, summa cum laude with major honors in music, from Houghton College and both an MA in Musicology and PhD in Musicology from Indiana University—Bloomington. A specialist in nineteenth-century music, she is particularly interested in French music, musical nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and the role of the press in reshaping musicians' public image during the mid-nineteenth century. Before coming to Texas Tech, she taught at Indiana University in the Musicology and Music in General Studies Departments.

Dr. Whealton is an interdisciplinary researcher and pedagogue, engaging with travel theory, French history, and cultural studies, as well as gender and disability studies. In her dissertation, titled “Travel, Ideology, and the Geographical Imagination: Parisian Musical Travelogues, 1830–1870,” she investigated how Parisian musicians like Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz, and Félicien David used prose travelogues and travel-inspired compositions to craft their public personae, contribute to sociopolitical discourse, and innovatively construct musically simulated travel. At Indiana, she developed and was the instructor for Women Musicians, a liberal arts course that examines women as performers, composers, patrons, and educators in Western music from the Middle Ages to the present. In 2016, she presented a pedagogy paper on nineteenth-century musical disability narratives at the AMS Music and Disability Study Group meeting.

Dr. Whealton's writing and archival research in Europe have been supported by a series of grants, including a Mellon Innovating International Research and Teaching Fellowship, a Bartlet Grant from the American Musicological Society, and awards from the American Council for Polish Culture and the Polish American Arts Association. As a doctoral candidate at Indiana University, she won the Freda and Walter Kaufmann Musicology Prize.

She has published preliminary research on Liszt as a travel writer in a review article in the Journal of the American Liszt Society (2012). Currently, she has two forthcoming articles: one on the nineteenth-century composer, pianist, and music critic Juliette Dillon, and the other on Berlioz's Harold en Italie.  In 2015, she was an invited speaker at Refleksja humanistyczna w planowaniu przestrzennym” (Humanistic Reflection in Spatial Planning), a conference of the Fryderyk Chopin Institute and the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She gave an invited colloquium at the Institut der Hochschule für Musik FRANZ LISZT Weimar/Das Institut für Musikwissenschaft Weimar-Jena in June 2018.

Dr. Whealton has presented at conferences in the United States, Canada, and Europe, including the AMS Annual Meeting (2015), the Francophone Music Criticism Network Colloquium (2013, 2015), the Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History (2016), the conference Symphonism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2018), and the Biennial Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music (2018). She has given papers at interdisciplinary conferences such as the Travel Cultures seminar series at Oxford University (2012) and the Council for European Studies (2015).

She remains active as a freelance academic writer, editor, and translator. Her recent projects include program notes for the Bard Music Festival, a translation in Chopin and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), and work for “In Mrs. Goldberg's Kitchen: Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź” (http://jewish-lodz.iu.edu/en/), a collaborative project between Indiana University and the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź, Poland.

A Virginian, she maintains her links to the Hampton Roads area by serving on the advisory board of the Bay Youth Orchestras of Virginia. She enjoys fiddling, playing classical violin and piano repertoire, and practicing her French and Polish. Her calico cat, Mylena, serves as her senior research assistant.