Faculty Profiles
The Institute is shaped by its faculty. Members of the faculty hold joint appointments in the Institute and one of the professional schools, either Music or Divinity. All offer courses that enhance the curricula of their respective schools and reflect the mission of the Institute. As the following profiles indicate, the faculty bring a variety of gifts and expertise, representing the finest in their disciplines.
Teresa Berger Professor of Liturgical Studies. Originally from Germany, Professor Berger holds doctorates in both liturgical studies and constructive theology. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersections of these disciplines with gender theory, specifically gender history. Her most recent book, Gender Differences and the Making of Liturgical History, was published in the Ashgate series Liturgy, Worship and Society in 2011. Previous publications include Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global Context (2001); Fragments of Real Presence: Liturgical Traditions in the Hands of Women (2005); and a video documentary, Worship in Women’s Hands (2007). Professor Berger has also written on the hymns of Charles Wesley and on the liturgical thought of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholic revival. She coedited, with Bryan Spinks, the volume The Spirit in Worship—Worship in the Spirit (2009) and is editor of the volume of essays from the most recent ISM Liturgy Conference, titled Liturgy in Migration: From the Upper Room to Cyberspace. An active Roman Catholic, Professor Berger has produced (with MysticWaters Media) a CD-ROM, Ocean Psalms: Meditations, Stories, Prayers, Songs and Blessings from the Sea (2008), and she contributes to the liturgy blog Pray Tell. Professor Berger has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Mainz, Münster, Berlin, and Uppsala. In 2003 she received the distinguished Herbert Haag Prize for Freedom in the Church. L.Th. St. John’s College, Nottingham; M.Th. Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz; Dr.Theol. Ruprecht Karl-Universität, Heidelberg; Dipl.Theol. Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz; Dr.Theol. and Habilitation Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster
Jeffrey Brillhart Lecturer in Organ Improvisation. Jeffrey Brillhart has performed throughout the United States, South America, South Africa, and Europe as conductor and organist and is known for his musical versatility. He was awarded first place at the American Guild of Organists National Competition in Organ Improvisation in 1994. Mr. Brillhart is director of music and fine arts at Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, where he oversees music, education, and arts programs that involve more than 500 children, youth, and adults each week. He is also music director of Philadelphia’s acclaimed Singing City Choir, one of the first integrated community choirs in the United States. At Singing City he follows a distinguished line of conductors that includes Elaine Brown and Joseph Flummerfelt. Under his direction, his choral ensembles have performed with the Kronos Quartet, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Symphony in C, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Bobbie McFerrin, Dave Brubeck, Helmuth Rilling, and Rossen Milanov, and on tours to Cuba, Northern Ireland, Brazil, and the Balkans. Mr. Brillhart maintains an active schedule as conductor, organist, competition adjudicator, and clinician, most recently at the Curtis Institute of Music, the Eastman School of Music, Westminster Choir College, Furman University, Walla Walla College, and Baylor University. His organ improvisation textbook, Breaking Free: Finding a Personal Language for Organ Improvisation through 20th-Century French Improvisation Techniques, was published by Wayne Leupold Editions in 2011. M.M. Eastman School of Music
Marguerite L. Brooks Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Choral Conducting. Professor Brooks was named to the faculty in 1985 to chair Yale’s graduate program in choral conducting and to direct the Institute’s choral activities. She conducts the Yale Camerata and serves as director of music at the Church of the Redeemer (UCC) in New Haven. She has taught at Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and Amherst College, and was director of choral music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. B.A. Mount Holyoke College; M.M. Temple University
Peter S. Hawkins Professor Hawkins’s work has long centered on Dante, most recently in Dante’s Testaments: Essays on Scriptural Imagination (winner of a 2001 AAR Book Prize), The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Reflections (2001), coedited with Rachel Jacoff, and Dante: A Brief History (2006). The poet features as well in his expansion of his 2007 Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching in Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (2009). His research in the history of biblical reception has led to three coedited volumes to which he also contributed essays: Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs (2006), Medieval Readings of Romans (2007), and From the Margins I: Women of the Hebrew Bible and Their Afterlives (2009). Together with Paula Carlson he has edited the Augsburg Fortress four-volume series Listening for God: Contemporary Literature and the Life of Faith. He has also written on twentieth-century fiction (The Language of Grace), utopia (Getting Nowhere), and the language of ineffability (Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett). Professor Hawkins’s essays have dealt with such topics as memory and memorials, televangelism, scriptural interpretation, and preaching. From 2000 to 2008 he directed the Luce Program in Scripture and Literary Arts at Boston University. While at BU he won the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has served on the editorial boards of PMLA and Christianity and Literature and on the selection committees of both the Luce Fellows in Theology and the Dante Society of America. In spring 2012 he was a research fellow in Italy at the Centro Studi Ligure in Bogliasco (Genoa) and a senior visiting professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He has chapters forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of the Psalms and in a Cambridge University Press volume, Dante in Context. Professor Hawkins is a fellow of Jonathan Edwards College and also teaches regularly in the Directed Studies Program in Yale College. B.A. University of Wisconsin at Madison; M.Div. Union Theological Seminary; Ph.D. Yale University
Martin D. Jean Professor of Organ, Professor in the Practice of Sacred Music, and Director of the Institute of Sacred Music. Professor Jean has performed widely throughout the United States and Europe and is known for his broad repertorial interests. He was awarded first place at the international Grand Prix de Chartres in 1986, and in 1992 at the National Young Artists’ Competition in Organ Performance. A student of Robert Glasgow, in the fall of 1999 he spent a sabbatical with Harald Vogel in North Germany. He has performed on four continents and in nearly all fifty states. In 2001 he presented a cycle of the complete organ works of Bach at Yale, and his compact discs of The Seven Last Words of Christ by Charles Tournemire and the complete Six Symphonies of Louis Vierne, both recorded in Woolsey Hall, have been released by Loft Recordings. Recordings of the organ symphonies and Stations of the Cross of Marcel Dupré are forthcoming on the Delos label. Professor Jean is on the board of directors of Lutheran Music Program. A.Mus.D. University of Michigan
Judith Malafronte Lecturer in Voice. Judith Malafronte has an active career as a mezzo-soprano soloist in opera, oratorio, and recital. She has appeared with the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, the St. Louis Symphony, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Handel and Haydn Society, and Mark Morris Dance Group. She has sung at the Tanglewood Festival, the Boston Early Music Festival, the Utrecht Early Music Festival, and the Göttingen Handel Festival. Winner of several top awards in Italy, Spain, Belgium, and the United States, including the Grand Prize at the International Vocal Competition in Hertogenbosch, Holland, Ms. Malafronte holds degrees with honors from Vassar College and Stanford University, and studied at the Eastman School of Music, in Paris and Fontainebleau with Mlle. Nadia Boulanger, and with Giulietta Simionato in Milan as a Fulbright scholar. She has recorded for major labels in a broad range of repertoire, from medieval chant to contemporary music, and her writings have appeared in Opera News, Stagebill, Islands, Early Music America Magazine, Schwann Inside, and Opus. Ms. Malafronte also teaches undergraduate music courses in Yale College. B.A. Vassar College; M.A. Stanford University
Vasileios Marinis Assistant Professor of Christian Art and Architecture. Professor Marinis has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including the Aidan Kavanagh Prize for Outstanding Scholarship at Yale, a Junior Fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the S.C. and P.C. Coleman Senior Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has published on a variety of topics ranging from early Christian tunics decorated with New Testament scenes to medieval tombs and Byzantine transvestite nuns. He is currently preparing a monograph on the interchange of architecture and ritual in the medieval churches of Constantinople. Before coming to Yale he was the first holder of the Kallinikeion Chair of Byzantine Art at Queens College, CUNY. B.A. University of Athens; D.E.A. Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne; M.A.R. Yale University; L.M.S. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of Toronto; Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mark Miller Lecturer in the Practice of Sacred Music. Since 1994, Mark Miller has served on the faculty of Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey, where he is director of music, composer in residence, and instructor in church music. He is also the minister of music at Christ Church in Summit, New Jersey; minister of music at Covenant United Methodist Church in Plainfield, New Jersey; and composer in residence for the Harmonium Choral Society, based in Morris County, New Jersey. From 2002 to 2007 he was director of contemporary worship at Marble Collegiate Church, and from 1999 to 2001 was music associate and assistant organist at the Riverside Church, both in New York City. He travels regularly around the country to perform concerts and lead worship. He has published music with Abingdon Press, Choirster’s Guild, and Pilgrim Press, and his songs are found in the hymnals The Faith We Sing, For Everyone Born, Zion Still Sings, Sing! Prayer and Praise, Amazing Abundance, and others. His organ work, Toccata on “God Rest Ye Merry” (recorded in 2000 on Gothic’s label) was featured on National Public Radio’s program Pipe Dreams. James Earl Jones was the narrator of his original work Let Justice Roll: Song from a Birmingham Jail, which was also featured on NBC’s program Positively Black. B.A. Yale University; M.M. The Juilliard School
Walden Moore Lecturer in Organ. Walden Moore graduated from the ISM/School of Music in 1980, after organ studies with Robert Baker and Gerre Hancock. He has been organist and choirmaster of Trinity Church, New Haven, since 1984, where he works with the renowned Choir of Men and Boys, the Choir of Men and Girls, and the parish mixed-adult choir in a regular schedule of parish services and outside appearances. He has served as clinician, guest conductor, and organist for choir festivals across the nation. He is past chair of the Music Commission of the Episcopal Diocese of Connecticut, and has served on the Executive Board of the Connecticut Chapter of the American Choral Directors Association. He has also served as consultant in organ design for several churches in Connecticut. Since January 2007 he has been team-teaching a course in service playing with fellow Baker student Mark Miller. B.M. University of Kentucky; M.M. Yale University
Thomas Murray Professor in the Practice of Organ. Professor Murray has been a member of the faculty since 1981 and was appointed University organist in 1990. Successor to Charles Krigbaum and Robert Baker as the senior professor of organ, he teaches the organ literature seminar and gives instruction to graduate organ majors. His performing career has taken him to all parts of Europe and to Japan, Australia, and Argentina. He has appeared as a soloist with the Pittsburgh, Houston, Milwaukee, and New Haven symphony orchestras, the National Chamber Orchestra in Washington, D.C., and the Moscow Chamber Orchestra during its tour of Finland in 1996. The American Guild of Organists named him International Performer of the Year in 1986. The Royal College of Organists in England awarded him an FRCO diploma honoris causa in 2003, and in 2007 the Yale School of Music awarded him the Gustave Stoeckel Award for excellence in teaching. During his years at Yale he has at times been active as a choral conductor, and prior to joining the faculty he was organist and choirmaster at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul (Episcopal) in Boston. Professor Murray is principal organist and artist-in-residence at Christ Church Episcopal in New Haven, where he mentors a current ISM organ major. A.B. Occidental College
Sally M. Promey Professor of Religion and Visual Culture (ISM), Professor of American Studies (Faculty of Arts and Sciences), and Deputy Director of the Institute of Sacred Music. Professor Promey is director of the Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (http://mavcor.yale.edu), generously supported by a grant awarded in 2008 from the Henry Luce Foundation. She convenes the Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group at Yale. Prior to arriving in New Haven in 2007, she was chair and professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, where she taught for fifteen years. Her scholarship explores relations among visual/material cultures and religions in the United States from the colonial period through the present. Current book projects include volumes titled “Religion in Plain View: The Public Aesthetics of American Belief” and “Written on the Heart: Sensory Cultures, Material Practices, and American Christianities.” She is editing, with Richard Meyer and Mia Mochizuki, a volume titled “Sensational Religion: Sense and Contention in Material Practice,” under contract with Yale University Press; and coediting, with Leigh Eric Schmidt, a volume titled “American Religious Liberalism Revisited.” Among earlier publications, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s “Triumph of Religion” at the Boston Public Library received the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the historical study of religion, and Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in American art. Recent articles and book chapters include essays titled “Hearts and Stones: Material Transformation and the Stuff of American Christianities”; “Sensory Cultures: Material and Visual Religion Reconsidered” (coauthored with Shira Brisman); “Mirror Images: Framing the Self in Early New England Material Piety”; and “Taste Cultures and the Visual Practice of Liberal Protestantism, 1940–1965.” Professor Promey is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a residential fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, two Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowships (1993 and 2003) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers. In 2001 she received the Regent’s Faculty Award for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity from the University System of Maryland, and in 2002 the Kirwan Faculty Research and Scholarship Prize, University of Maryland. She was codirector (with David Morgan, Duke University) of a multiyear interdisciplinary collaborative project, “The Visual Culture of American Religions,” funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Lilly Endowment Inc. A book of the same title, coedited by Professors Promey and Morgan, appeared in 2001 from University of California Press. In 2004 she was senior historian in residence for the Terra Summer Residency Program in Giverny, France. She serves on the editorial boards of Material Religion, American Art, and Winterthur Portfolio, and the Advisory Committee of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture at the American Antiquarian Society. Professor Promey is a fellow of Berkeley College. B.A. Hiram College; M.Div. Yale University; Ph.D. University of Chicago
Markus Rathey Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Music History. Professor Rathey studied musicology, Protestant theology, and German philology in Bethel and Münster. He taught at the University of Mainz and the University of Leipzig and was a research fellow at the Bach-Archiv, Leipzig, before joining the Yale faculty in 2003. His research interests are music of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, Johann Sebastian Bach, and the relationship among music, religion, and politics during the Enlightenment. Recent publications include the books Johann Rudolph Ahle (1625–1673): Lebensweg und Schaffen (Eisenach, 1999), an edition of Johann Georg Ahle’s Music Theoretical Writings (Hildesheim, 2007, 2nd edition 2008), and Kommunikation und Diskurs: Die Bürgerkapitänsmusiken Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs (Hildesheim, 2009). He was guest editor of a volume of the German journal Musik und Kirche (2005) on church music in the United States. He has contributed numerous articles to Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the Laaber Lexikon der Kirchenmusik, and the handbook for the new German Hymnal (Liederkunde zum Evangelischen Gesangbuch). Recently, Professor Rathey published a chapter on Bach’s chorale cantatas in the new Laaber Bach-Handbuch. He has published numerous articles on music by Bach and his contemporaries in scholarly journals such as Eighteenth-Century Music, Early Music History, Bach-Jahrbuch, and Schütz-Jahrbuch. Professor Rathey was president of the Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship (2009–2011); currently he serves on the editorial board of BACH: Journal of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute and the board of directors for the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music. Ph.D. Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster
Melanie Ross Assistant Professor of Liturgical Studies. Professor Ross received her doctorate in Liturgical Studies from the University of Notre Dame, where she studied under Nathan Mitchell and Maxwell Johnson. Before coming to Yale, she was assistant professor of worship leadership at Huntington University and taught courses in worship, theology, and pastoral ministry. A member of the Evangelical Free Church of America, Professor Ross pursues research that facilitates the intersection of popular American evangelicalism and academic liturgical theology. Her articles have been published in the journals Worship, Pro Ecclesia, Liturgy, and the Scottish Journal of Theology. In 2010, with Simon Jones, she edited The Serious Business of Worship: Essays in Honour of Bryan D. Spinks (Continuum Books). Her first authored book, “Evangelical vs. Liturgical? Defying a Dichotomy,” is under contract with Eerdmans Press. B.S. Messiah College; M.A.R. Yale University; Ph.D. University of Notre Dame
Bryan D. Spinks Bishop F. Percy Goddard Professor of Liturgical Studies and Pastoral Theology. Professor Spinks teaches courses on marriage liturgy; English Reformation worship traditions; the eucharistic prayer and theology, Christology, and liturgy of the Eastern churches; and contemporary worship. Research interests include East Syrian rites, Reformed rites, issues in theology and liturgy, and worship in a postmodern age. His most recent books are Early and Medieval Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From the New Testament to the Council of Trent (2006); Reformation and Modern Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: From Luther to Contemporary Practices (2006); and Liturgy in the Age of Reason: Worship and Sacraments in England and Scotland, 1662–c. 1800 (2008). The Worship Mall: Liturgical Initiatives and Responses in a Postmodern Global World was published by SPCK (London 2010; New York 2011). He coedited, with Teresa Berger, The Spirit in Worship—Worship in the Spirit (2009). Other recent publications include “Liturgical Theology and Criticism—Things of Heaven and Things of the Earth: Some Reflections on Worship, World Christianity, and Culture” in Christian Worship Worldwide: Expanding Horizons, Deepening Practices; “Renaissance Liturgical Reforms: Reflections on Intentions and Methods” in Reformation & Renaissance Review; “Eastern Christian Liturgical Traditions, Oriental Orthodox” in The Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity; and “The Growth of Liturgy and the Church Year” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, Vol. II: Constantine to c. 600. He is currently writing a book on the eucharist and working on the Syriac Liturgy of St. James. Professor Spinks is coeditor of the Scottish Journal of Theology, a former consultant to the Church of England Liturgical Commission, president emeritus of the Church Service Society of the Church of Scotland, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of Churchill College, Cambridge. He is a regular Sunday Presbyter in the Middlesex Area Cluster Ministry. Professor Spinks is a fellow of Morse College. B.A. (Hons), Dip.Th. University of Durham; M.Th. University of London; B.D., D.D. University of Durham
Masaaki Suzuki Visiting Professor of Choral Conducting and Conductor of Yale Schola Cantorum. Since founding Bach Collegium Japan in 1990, Masaaki Suzuki has established himself as a leading authority on the works of J.S. Bach. He has remained the group’s music director ever since, taking it regularly to major venues and festivals in Europe and the United States. In addition to working with renowned period ensembles, such as Collegium Vocale Gent and Philharmonia Baroque, he is invited to conduct modern instrument orchestras in repertoire as diverse as Britten, Haydn, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Stravinsky. Last season saw his debut appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, while engagements for 2011–2012 include performances of Mozart’s Mass in C minor with the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin and the Melbourne Symphony, engagements with the Rotterdam Philharmonic and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and a return visit to the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir. Professor Suzuki’s discography on the BIS label, featuring Bach’s complete works for harpsichord and his interpretations of Bach’s major choral works and sacred cantatas with Bach Collegium Japan (of which he has completed nearly fifty volumes of a project to record the complete series) have brought him many critical plaudits. In 2010 he and Bach Collegium Japan were awarded both a German Record Critics’ Award (Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik) and a Diapason d’Or de l’Année for their recording of Bach motets, which has also been honored in 2011 with a BBC Music Magazine Award. Highlights of last season with Bach Collegium Japan featured twentieth anniversary concerts in Tokyo, a visit to the Hong Kong Arts Festival, and a U.S. tour that included an appearance at Carnegie Hall. Professor Suzuki combines his conducting career with his work as an organist and harpsichordist. Born in Kobe, he graduated from the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music with a degree in composition and organ performance and went on to study harpsichord and organ at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam under Ton Koopman and Piet Kee. He is founder and head of the early music department at the Tokyo University of the Arts. In April 2001 Professor Suzuki was decorated with the Federal Order of Merit from Germany.
James Taylor Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Voice. With an extensive repertoire ranging from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century, tenor James Taylor devotes much of his career to oratorio and concert literature. One of the most sought-after Bach tenors of our time, he performed the St. Matthew Passion for his debut with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur. His career has taken him throughout the United States, South America, Japan, Israel, and to virtually all the major concert halls of Europe with conductors such as Rilling, Harnoncourt, Herreweghe, Jacobs, Suzuki, Koopman, Labadie, Welser-Möst, Nézet-Séguin, and Christophers. His artistry has been documented on more than thirty professional CD and DVD recordings for labels such as Sony, Hänssler, harmonia mundi, and Naxos. He joined the Yale faculty in 2005 and serves as adviser for the voice program in Early Music, Oratorio, and Chamber Ensemble. B.Mus. Texas Christian University; Master’s Diploma, Hochschule für Musik, Munich
Ted Taylor Lecturer in Voice. Equally at home in the pit conducting a repertoire of more than fifty operas and musicals or on the stage accompanying some of the world’s preeminent vocalists, Ted Taylor enjoys a varied international career. As pianist he has appeared with such luminaries as Sylvia McNair, Christine Schäfer, Ben Heppner, Kathleen Battle, Eileen Farrell, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Régine Crespin, and Carlo Bergonzi, and as a conductor who has appeared with many American opera companies, he made his New York City Opera debut in 2003 conducting La Traviata. Mr. Taylor has been a member of the conducting staffs of the Metropolitan Opera and Lyric Opera of Chicago and also served as music director of the New York City Opera National Company. In April 2009 he conducted the world premier of Libby Larsen’s Picnic for the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has recorded for Philips, CRI, BBC Worldwide, and Leonarda labels. In the field of contemporary opera, Mr. Taylor served as assistant to Academy Award-winning composer Tan Dun for the premiere of his first opera, Marco Polo, at the Munich Biennale and prepared the Hong Kong Philharmonic and Tokyo Philharmonic orchestras for subsequent performances. This fall marks his thirteenth year on the faculty of the Opera Program at Mannes College The New School for Music in New York City and his seventh year with the Institute of Sacred Music. He has guest conducted at such music schools as Indiana University and Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. This summer found him teaching for the third time in the University of Houston’s seminar Le Chiavi di Bel Canto, and he returned for his sixth year as master coach for CoOPERAtive at Westminster Choir College in Princeton. Next spring he will return to coach and play at the Metropolitan Opera National Council Grand Final Awards for the third year. A native Texan, he makes his home in Manhattan, where he maintains an active studio as coach and teacher. B.M. George Peabody College, Vanderbilt University; M.M. Indiana University
Thomas H. Troeger J. Edward and Ruth Cox Lantz Professor of Christian Communication. Professor Troeger has written twenty books in the fields of preaching, poetry, hymnody, worship, and the theology of music and is a frequent contributor to journals dedicated to these topics. His most recent books include Sermon Sparks: 156 Ideas to Ignite Your Preaching; Wonder Reborn: Creating Sermons on Hymns, Music and Poetry; and God, You Made All Things for Singing: Hymn Texts, Anthems, and Poems for a New Millennium. He is also a flutist and a poet whose work appears in the hymnals of most denominations and in SATB anthem settings by many contemporary composers. For three years Professor Troeger hosted the Season of Worship broadcast for Cokesbury, and he has led conferences and lectureships in worship and preaching throughout North America, as well as in Denmark, Holland, Australia, Japan, and Africa. Ordained in the Presbyterian Church in 1970 and in the Episcopal Church in 1999, he is dually aligned with both traditions. He is a former president of the Academy of Homiletics (the North American guild of scholars in homiletics) and of Societas Homiletica (the international guild of scholars in homiletics). He has served as the national chaplain to the American Guild of Organists. He was awarded an honorary D.D. degree from Virginia Theological Seminary. Professor Troeger is a fellow of Silliman College. B.A. Yale University; B.D. Colgate Rochester Divinity School; S.T.D. Dickinson College
Visiting Faculty, 2012–2013
Harald Buchinger Visiting Professor of Liturgical Studies. Professor Buchinger is currently professor of liturgical studies at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria. Having obtained a diploma in church music, he studied theology in Vienna and Jerusalem. After graduating from the University of Vienna, he spent three years in Rome engaged in postdoctoral studies and research. During his time as associate professor of liturgical studies in Vienna, he also taught liturgy in the Department of Church Music of the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln. He has lectured at various universities, notably in Jerusalem and Leuven. His research focuses on the reception of the Bible in liturgy, on the relationship between Christian and Jewish liturgy, and on the development of the liturgical year; his interests include chant and forms of artistic expression in worship. At Yale he will investigate the liturgy of Holy Week and Easter in the High Medieval West, with special reference to music, drama, and the arts. Mag.Theol., Dr.Theol. University of Vienna
Melvin L. Butler Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology. Professor Butler is an assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago. An ethnomusicologist with broad interests in music and religion of the African diaspora, he has conducted field research on popular music making in relation to charismatic Christianity in Haitian, Jamaican, and African American communities. In these transnational contexts, he interrogates the cultural politics of musical style and religious expression while attending to the role of musical performance in constructing individual and collective identities. Much of his research centers on the phenomenology of Pentecostal musical worship, how the transcendent becomes immanent through musical performance, and the intersections of faith, ritual, gender, and power. These interests fuel his ongoing concern with ethnographic representation and the ways in which scholars negotiate their identities in relation to various fields of supernatural encounter. During his fellowship year, he will continue work on his forthcoming book “Claiming Haiti: Pentecostalism and the Theopolitics of Musical Performance,” which explores music and Pentecostalism in Haiti and its U.S. diaspora. B.M. Berklee College of Music; M.A., Ph.D. New York University
Robin A. Leaver Visiting Professor of Music History. Professor Leaver is internationally recognized as a hymnologist, musicologist, liturgical expert, Bach scholar, and Reformation specialist, who has authored numerous books and articles in the cross-disciplinary areas of liturgy, church music, theology, and hymnology. A primary area of Professor Leaver’s research is Lutheran church music, in which he has made significant contributions to Luther, Schütz, Bach, Brahms, and other studies. A festschrift was recently published in his honor, Theology and Music: Essays in Honor of Robin A Leaver, edited by Daniel Zager (Scarecrow Press). His major study, Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications (Eerdmans) was published in 2007; and his latest book is A Communion Sunday in Scotland ca. 1780: Liturgies and Sermons (2009). Current research involves several projects of Bach studies. Professor Leaver has taught at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford; Westminster Choir College; Princeton University; and Drew University; and is currently a visiting professor at the Juilliard School and at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His honors include Winston Churchill Fellow, Honorary Member of the Riemenschneider Bach Institute, and Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music. He is a past president of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Hymnologie and of the American Bach Society. Dr.Theol. Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Ayla Lepine Lecturer in Christian Art and Architecture. Ms. Lepine’s art and architectural research combines theological perspectives with investigations of modernity. Her work focuses on Victorian visual culture and sacred space, and her Ph.D. thesis concerned G. F. Bodley’s Gothic Revival projects at Oxford and Cambridge. She has convened international interdisciplinary conferences including Gothic and Its Legacies (2009, with Laura Cleaver) and Intersections: Architecture and Poetry (2011, with Caroline Levitt). Ms. Lepine has taught postgraduate and undergraduate audiences at the University of Warwick, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the National Gallery, and King’s College London. She has lectured in America, Europe, and Australia on subjects ranging from the Aesthetic Movement and queer perspectives on nineteenth-century imagery to the perception of art as a theological medium. Her work has been published in Music and Modernism (ed. Charlotte de Mille, 2011), Art and Christianity, The Burlington Magazine, and The Architects’ Journal. Her current interests include modern monasticism, Anglican art, cityscapes as soundscapes, contemporary artists’ engagement with sacrament, and ritual. B.A. University of Victoria, Canada; Dipl. University of Oxford; M.A., Ph.D. The Courtauld Institute of Art
David Mahan Lecturer in Religion and Literature. A graduate of Yale Divinity School in religion and literature (1995) and winner of the Religion and the Arts Prize, Mr. Mahan has focused on the relationship between works of the literary imagination and the tasks of Christian theology. His doctoral research at the University of Cambridge specifically explored the connection between poetic form and the witnessing aims of a responsive theological discourse. He published his dissertation under the title “An Unexpected Light”: Theology and Witness in the Poetry and Thought of Charles Williams, Micheal O’Siadhail, and Geoffrey Hill (2009). In addition to numerous papers and book reviews, his essay “‘A summons to try to look, to try to see’” appears as a chapter in the collection Musics of Belonging: The Poetry of Micheal O’Siadhail (2007). He currently awaits publication of “Hearts of Stone and Feet of Clay: Geoffrey Hill’s Troubled Pilgrims” in the Spring 2011 issue of Christianity and Literature. Having served as a campus minister at Yale since 1987, Mr. Mahan is currently the president of the Rivendell Institute at Yale, a Christian research and study center founded in 1995. B.A. Miami University of Ohio; M.A.R. Yale University; Ph.D. University of Cambridge
David W. Stowe Visiting Professor of American Religious History. Professor Stowe has written widely on music and religion in American culture, including No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (2011); How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (2004), which won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award; and Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (1994), which was published in Japanese in 1999. He is professor of English and Religious Studies at Michigan State University, where he served as director of the Program in American Studies. Professor Stowe taught for three years at the Graduate School of American Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto, where he also served as associate dean. He is a founding member of the Institute for the Study of Christianity and Culture, a research institute based in Lansing, Michigan. At Yale, he will research and complete the manuscript for his next book, “Babylon Revisited: How Psalm 137 Helped Americans Make a Nation,” charting the subtle changes in emphasis and interpretation of a thirteen-line Hebrew poem to help make new sense of religious, musical, and political change in North America. B.A. Haverford College; Ph.D. Yale University
Affiliated Faculty
Karla Britton Lecturer in Christian Art and Architecture. Ms. Britton’s academic work focuses on the modern architect’s engagement with tradition in twentieth-century architecture and urbanism. Her teaching has emphasized the intersection of classicism and modernization, the evolution of modern ecclesiastical building, and the relationship between religion and modern architecture in a multireligious context. Ms. Britton’s books include the monograph Auguste Perret (published by Phaidon Press in English and French, 2001), the prizewinning Hawaiian Modern (Yale University Press, 2008; edited with Dean Sakamoto), and the interdisciplinary Constructing the Ineffable (Yale School of Architecture, 2011). Her current book project, “Middle Ground/Middle East: Religious Sites in Urban Contexts,” explores religious space in contemporary urbanism. Before coming to Yale, Ms. Britton was director of the architecture program in Paris of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and associate professor (adjunct) of architecture. She is resident director of the Berkeley Center at Yale. B.A. University of Colorado Boulder; M.A. Columbia University; Ph.D. Harvard University
Maggi E. Dawn Associate Dean for Marquand Chapel and Associate Professor (Adjunct) of Theology and Literature. Originally from England, Professor Dawn came to Yale in 2011 after teaching and serving as chaplain at the University of Cambridge for a number of years. She teaches performative theology, theology and literature, and liturgical studies. She is the author of four books: The Accidental Pilgrim: Modern Journeys on Ancient Pathways (Hodder and Stoughton, 2011), The Writing on the Wall: High Art, Popular Culture and the Bible (Hodder and Stoughton, 2010), Giving it Up: Daily Bible Readings from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day (Oxford: BRF, 2009), and Beginnings and Endings (and What Happens in Between): Daily Bible Readings from Advent to Epiphany (Oxford: BRF, 2007). In addition to publishing articles and essays in journals and periodicals, she has contributed chapters to four collections of essays: An Acceptable Sacrifice?: Homosexuality and the Church (ed. Dormor and Morris, SPCK 2007), Anglicanism: The Answer to Modernity (ed. Dormor, McDonald, and Caddick, Continuum, 2003), The Rite Stuff: Ritual in Contemporary Christian Worship and Mission (ed. P. Ward, BRF, 2004), and Post-Evangelical Debate (Dawn et al., SPCK 1997). She is the composer of contemporary songs and hymns, published variously by EMI (Kingsway) and Big Jungle Music. Professor Dawn is an ordained priest in the Church of England, an accredited pastoral supervisor with APSE (Association of Pastoral Supervisors & Educators), a writer member of PRS for Music, and a member of the Society for the Study of Theology (UK). She serves on the advisory board for the Royal School of Church Music and is a senior member of King’s College and Robinson College in the University of Cambridge, where she was formerly chaplain and fellow. B.A., M.A., Ph.D., University of Cambridge, England
Avi Stein teaches vocal repertoire at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, continuo accompaniment at the Juilliard School, and harpsichord at the Longy School, and is the music director at St. Matthew and St. Timothy Episcopal Church in Manhattan. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2005, and he was recently featured in Early Music America magazine in an article on the new generation of leaders in the field. Mr. Stein has performed throughout the United States and in Europe, Canada, and Central America. An active continuo accompanist, he plays regularly with the Boston Early Music Festival, the Trinity Church Wall Street Choir and Baroque Orchestra, the Clarion Music Society, and Bach Vespers NYC. Mr. Stein directed the young artists’ program at the Carmel Bach Festival and has conducted a variety of ensembles, including the Opéra Français de New York, the Opera Omnia, and the critically acclaimed annual 4x4 Baroque Music Festival. Mr. Stein studied at Indiana University, the Eastman School of Music, and the University of Southern California, and was a Fulbright scholar in Toulouse. B.M. Eastman School of Music; M.M. University of Southern California
