Overview

Kelly St. Pierre works as an Associate Professor of Musicology at Wichita State University. She received her PhD in musicology from Case Western Reserve University in 2012. Her research examines the roles of propaganda in shaping Czech music and its reception through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book on this topic, Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda, was released in 2017 with the University of Rochester Press. Her newest book project, Trauma and Memory in Czech Folksong Research, focuses specifically on the emergence of ethnomusicology alongside notions of ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Czechoslovakia. She spent the academic year 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 on a Fulbright grant in support of this project, researching at the Czech Academy of Science’s Ethnological Institute as well as serving on the musicology faculty of Prague’s Charles University. She also holds a second full-time position in Prague as a researcher on the project The Second Sense: Sound, Hearing and Nature in Czech Modernity at the Center for Theoretical Studies (CTS). The CTS is a joint program of both Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Selected Publications

Books

  • Martin Nedbal, Kelly St. Pierre, and Hana Vlhová-Wörner, eds. Cambridge History of Music in the Czech Lands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2024.
  • Helena Spurná and Kelly St. Pierre, eds. New Paths in Opera: Martinů, Burian, Hába, Schulhoff, Ulmmann. Prague: Koniasch Latin Press, forthcoming January, 2022.
  • Kelly St. Pierre. Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda. New York: University of Rochester Press/Boydell & Brewer, 2017.

Articles and Book Chapters

  • And Ondřej Skovajsa, “Music and Ethnic Cleansing.” In Cambridge History of Music in the Czech Lands, edited by Martin Nedbal, Kelly St. Pierre, and Hana Vlhová-Wörner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2024.
  • “Singing Women and ‘The Women Question’ in the Czech Lands.” In Apostles of a Brighter Future: Women and Nineteenth-Century Czech Musical Culture, edited by Anja Bunzel and Christopher Campo-Bowen. London: Routledge, forthcoming 2022.
  • “The ‘People’ in Czech and Slovak Music Criticism.” In Cambridge History of Music Criticism, edited by Christopher Dingle, 440-456. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.
  • “Smetana’s ‘Vyšehrad’ and Mythologies of Czechness in Scholarship.” 19th-Century Music 37/2 (Fall 2013): 91-112.

Encyclopedic Entries

  • “Smetana, Bedřich [Friedrich].” In Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, edited by Deane Root. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.