Portrait of Abigail Fine

Abigail Fine

Associate Professor of Musicology
Music
alfine@uoregon.edu
Phone: 541-346-5742
Office:
Research Interests: Cultural history, Germany and Austria, material studies, visual culture, historiography and reception

Abigail Fine is a musicologist who specializes in German and Austrian music culture. Prior to her appointment at UO in 2019, she served on the faculty at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She teaches courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, material studies, opera staging, memory, celebrity, and “writing musically.”

In her research, Fine focuses on materials that lie at the margins of traditional musicology, such as visual ephemera, amateur lyric, keepsakes, and feuilletons. Her book, The Composer Embalmed: Relic Culture from Piety to Kitsch (University of Chicago Press, 2025), examines a network of devotees who preserved tangible traces of composers through relics, rituals, and pilgrimage. The Composer Embalmed was awarded the DAAD/GSA Prize for the Best Book in Literature and Cultural Studies. She has published articles in 19th-Century Music, Music and Letters, and the Yale Journal of Music and Religion. Her current research explores album leaves, popular art music in magazines and periodicals, and the ties between German landscape preservation and musical heritage.

Fine welcomes MA and PhD applicants in musicology whose research interests intersect with her expertise in cultural studies, celebrity studies, German and Austrian studies, ephemera, archival methods, biography and historiography, and materiality, with a preference for advisees working on 19th-, 20th-, or 21st-century topics. Secondary areas of advising expertise include critical reception, Jewish identities in Germany and Austria, memory and heritage studies, museology, history of tourism, visual studies, and late style criticism. 

  • PhD, 2017, University of Chicago
  • BA, 2010, University of Pennsylvania

Honors

  • DAAD/German Studies Association Prize for the Best Book in Literature and Cultural Studies (2026)
  • Oregon Humanities Center, Faculty Research Fellowship (2021, 2024)
  • UO Faculty Research Award (2022, 2026)
  • UO Williams Council Instructional Grant: “Writing Musically” (2024)
  • UO Excellence in Remote Teaching Award (2020)
  • Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2016)
  • SSRC, International Dissertation Research Fellowship (2014)
  • DAAD, Deutscher akademischer Austauschdienst (2014
     

Books

The Composer Embalmed: Relic Culture from Piety to Kitsch (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Articles

“Towards a History of the Eccentric Artist: Beethoven’s Bad Manners and the Lure of the Anecdote,” Music & Letters 104:4 (2023), 567-591.

“Beethoven’s Mask and the Physiognomy of Late Style,” 19th-Century Music 43:3 (2020): 143-169.

“Assimilating to Art-Religion: Jewish Secularity and Edgar Zilsel’s Geniereligion (1918),” Yale Journal of Music & Religion, 6:2 (2020), Special Issue: Sound and Secularity, 10-32.