Jennifer Walker

Jennifer Walker is a scholar of French music and culture during the long nineteenth century. Her research reevaluates music’s role in the relationship between the French state and the Catholic church throughout the nineteenth century by offering an alternative to the prevailing epistemological emphasis on divisions between the church and the oft-secularized French state. More broadly, her research focuses on the intersections of music, politics, and religion in secular societies. Dr. Walker is also actively researching projects related to gender, opera, and critical reception.

Her book Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transformations of Catholicism in the Music of Third Republic Paris (AMS Studies in Music/ Oxford University Press, 2021) was the 2022 winner of the American Musicological Society’s H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Award for an outstanding scholarly work on the musical press, and her second book, Hector Berlioz’s Requiem, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. She is also the co-editor, along with Mark Everist, of the volume Genre and the Production of Gendered Identity on the Lyric Stage (Brepols, 2025). 

She is the author of numerous other articles and book chapters, including a forthcoming book chapter in the Cambridge History of Western Sacred Music from 1500 entitled “Western Art Music’s Struggle with Secularization,” the article “Church, State, and an Operatic Outlaw: Jules Massenet’s Hérodiade” (Cambridge Opera Journal, 2019) and “Les grands oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache” (Journal of Music Criticism, 2019). Recent book chapters include “Hearing the Hostias, Rehearing the Requiem” (Berlioz and His World, ed. Francesca Brittan and Sarah Hibberd, 2024), “Les Drames sacrés and Sacred Drama: Armand Silvestre, Eugène Morand, and Charles Gounod on the Neo-Christian Stage” (La musique religieuse en France au XIXe siècle, ed. Nicolas Dufetel, 2021) and “Biblical Boulevards: Sounding the Ralliement on Parisian Popular Stages (Sacred and Secular Intersections in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Markus Rathey and Eftychia Papanikolaou, 2022). Dr. Walker has written essays for the BBC Proms and the Bard Music Festival, has served as the scholar-in-residence for the La Jolla SummerFest, and her work on Berlioz has been translated into French. Her research has been funded by the ACLS, the American Musicological Society, the West Virginia Humanities Council, and the West Virginia University Humanities Center.

In addition to pursuing an active research program, Dr. Walker is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society. She serves on numerous committees of the AMS, on the International Steering Committee of the France: Musiques, Cultures, 1789–1914 Network, the Editorial Board of the Music Criticism Network, and she is an honorary member of the Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini (Lucca, Italy). Prior to joining the Williams community, she was an Associate Professor of Musicology at West Virginia University.