Devon Nelson is adjunct assistant professor of music in musicology at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where they recently finished their Ph.D. in musicology with a minor in historical performance.
Nelson’s dissertation, “The Antiquarian Creation of a Musical Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” on the construction of antiquarian music publications and their foundation in a wider multi-disciplinary antiquarian culture, was completed in May 2020.
Nelson also holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Roosevelt University's Chicago College of Performing Arts.
They have presented at national and international conferences, including Indiana University's Historical Performance: Theory, Practice, and Interdisciplinarity conference, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference, and the Utrecht Early Music Festival's STIMU symposium, where they won the 2017 STIMU Young Scholar Award.
Nelson’s article on the antiquarian reception of Charles Burney's history of music won the 2019 Hemlow Prize in Burney Studies and has since been published in The Burney Journal.
Their research interests include music and antiquarianism in Britain, music printing, historical instruments, issues of early-modern music and dance, and connections between music and drink.