Abigail Fine is a music historian specializing in German and Austrian music culture of the nineteenth century. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2017. Prior to her appointment at UO in 2019, she served on the faculty at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She teaches survey courses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music and opera history, as well as cultural-historical seminars on material studies, canon-formation, memory, the ethics of staging, and celebrity. 

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 forthcoming monograph, titled The Composer Embalmed: Relic Culture from Piety to Kitsch (University of Chicago Press, Spring 2025), offers a granular study of nineteenth-century composer-devotion—a network of devotees who preserved tangible traces of composers through relics, rituals, pilgrimage, exhuming, and embalming. She has published articles in 19th-Century Music, Music and Letters, and the Yale Journal of Music and Religion. Her current research explores how albums (or Stammbücher) housed by music institutions sought to archive the present in a time capsule, how the Albumblatt genre of parlor music reflected debates about kitsch, and how heritage preservation policies in late nineteenth-century Vienna informed the politics of musical prestige.

Fine welcomes MA and PhD applicants in musicology whose research interests intersect with her expertise in cultural studies, celebrity studies, German and Austrian studies, archival ephemera, biography and historiography, critical reception, and materiality, with a preference for advisees working on 19th-, 20th-, or 21st-century topics. Secondary areas of advising expertise include 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 

• UO Williams Council Instructional Grant: “Writing Musically” (2024)
• UO Faculty Research Award (2022)
• Oregon Humanities Center, Faculty Research Fellowship (2021)
• 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)