Giulia Accornero

Giulia Accornero joins Yale as an Assistant Professor of Music. She specializes in media theory and the global history of music theoretical practices. Her primary research focuses on early Islamicate music theory (in Arabic and Judeo-Arabic) and the ways in which it has shaped past and present musical discourse in Europe and North America. She is currently working on her first book, Tools of the Trade: Measuring Music in the Greater Mediterranean (850-1350), which investigates the cultural, cognitive, and material practices through which medieval music theorists from Baghdad to Paris made sense of musical time. Her second book-length project, Theorizing from the Temperate Zone: A Tale of Music and Climate Theory, takes the musical discourse of premodern Islamicate authors as a springboard for tracing the genealogy of ‘climatic determinism’—the ideology that climate determines the physical attributes and mental characteristics of individuals, giving rise to racial difference. 

Giulia also spearheads the project  Tartīb, a digital resource that aims to lower entry barriers to the study of Arabic music theory (750-1300 CE), which was awarded grants by the AMS and the Medieval Academy of America and will be published in 2025. She is the organizer of the 2024 fall colloquium series “Thinking with Sound: Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī as Music Theorist,” funded by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. The colloquium brings together for the first time scholars from musicology, history of philosophy, Near Eastern languages, and performance practice to investigate the work of philosopher al-Fārābī as music theorist.

Before arriving at Yale, Giulia obtained her PhD in Music Theory at Harvard University (2022) and served as a Graduate Fellow (2020) at The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa i Tatti.