Education
- Ph.D., French, Yale University, 2017
- B.A., French and German, University of Georgia, 2007
- B.Mus., Music Performance (Bassoon), University of Georgia, 2007
Elizabeth Hebbard is affiliated faculty, musicology, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and assistant professor, French and Italian, at the IU College of Arts and Sciences.
Hebbard's work primarily concerns medieval French and Occitan lyric composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and transmitted in manuscripts copied in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Her research explores notions of authorship and the relationship between lyric text and melodic setting. She investigates the fundamental tension between song as an ephemeral performance and as a fixed, written text, including the mise-en-page and manuscript context of song.
On the previous point, Hebbard's work on lyric intersects with her other main research focus: medieval manuscripts and the history of the book. She has trained extensively as a paleographer of both Latin and vernacular writing systems, and as a codicologist studying the construction and production of medieval manuscript and early print books.
She is particularly interested in manuscript fragments and in using digital tools to virtually reassemble books that have been dismantled and libraries that have been dispersed.
Hebbard has two separate yet related book projects. The first is a new catalogue of troubadour lyric manuscripts, which, as her work demonstrates, are more numerous than previously thought.
Her second book project is a critical history of the troubadour lyric archive based on the revised and updated material record presented in the catalogue. Hebbard shows that lesser-studied manuscripts challenge traditional notions of lyric authorship by demonstrating the extent to which these notions are rooted in the study of one kind of manuscript: the songbook.