Mary Channen Caldwell’s research on music in medieval Europe engages with the complementary disciplines of historical musicology and medieval studies and is driven by interests in the cultural, ritual, textual, and material aspects of music and its production, reception, and transmission. Across research and teaching, Caldwell employs methodologies that recognize the importance of notes on the page (incomplete as they are in premodern sources) while seeing these abstract reflections as part of complex systems of cultural meaning and history. While music is always at the core, her writing and teaching connect with a range of interrelated disciplines, including manuscript studies, gender studies, religious studies, liturgiology, hagiography, and dance studies. Published and forthcoming articles on a range of topics related to these interests appear in, among others, Early Music History, Plainsong & Medieval Music, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Musicology, Revue de musicologie, Music & Letters, and Speculum, as well as in edited volumes.
Caldwell’s first book, Devotional Refrains in Medieval Latin Song (Cambridge University Press, 2022), offers a critical approach to the Latin refrain and its songs, bringing attention to an understudied corpus of over 400 Latin vocal works from the Middle Ages. She explores for the first time the Latin refrain as a vibrant and multidimensional part of the varied landscape of medieval song, arguing for the importance of Latin song traditions within the devotional as well as daily lives of religious and educational communities across Europe. Her second book, Music, Miracles, and the Making of St. Nicholas (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press), continues this interest in music and culture, showing how music shaped the cult of St. Nicholas and, in turn, how Nicholas's cult transformed the history of medieval music. She is also writing a book on song and conversion in medieval Europe, exploring song as a medium, metaphor, and agent of religious transformation. She also co-edited with Dr. Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne Latin Song in the Medieval West (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2026), which features an introduction and thirteen contributions by international scholars.
At Penn, Caldwell is the co-director of a concert series between the Department of Music and Penn Libraries called Music in the Pavilion. In 2018, she co-organized an interdisciplinary symposium titled “Gothic Arts” with colleagues in Art History and History, which brought together scholars from within and outside of the United States, and in 2024 a virtual symposium hosted by Penn on early dance with the Dance Studies Association, New Work on Old Dance: A Pre-1800 Dance Studies Symposium.
Caldwell received her PhD in Music History and Theory from the University of Chicago in 2013 and a Bachelor of Music degree from the School of Music at Queen’s University (Ontario, Canada) in 2006. Her teaching and research have been supported by the University of Chicago, the American Musicological Society, the John Anson Kittredge Fund, the American Philosophical Society, the NEH, the American Academy of Religion, UCLA’s CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, the Wolf Humanities Center, and the Radcliffe Institute. In 2021, Caldwell was awarded the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Caldwell presents regularly at conferences and symposia in Canada, the United States, and Europe, including papers at the national meetings of the American Musicological Society and the Medieval Academy of America.