Margot E. Fassler

Keough-Hesburgh Professor Emerita of Music History and Liturgy
Co-Director and Director of Sacred Music at Notre Dame (2010-2022)

Disciplines: Musicology, Theology

Education

• MA in Musicology, Syracuse University
• MPhil, Cornell University
• PhD, Cornell University

Professional Biography

Margot Fassler, Keough-Hesburgh Professor Emerita of Music History and Liturgy, University of Notre Dame and Robert Tangeman Professor Emerita of Music History, Yale University, was Co-director and Director of Notre Dame’s Program in Sacred Music from 2010-2022 and Director of
the Institute of Sacred Music, Yale University (1994-2005). Recent books include The Virgin of Chartres (Yale, 2010); Music in the Medieval West and its accompanying Anthology (New York, 2014); (with Jeffery Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, and Susan Marti) Life and Latin Learning at
Paradies bei Soest, 1300-1425: Inscription and Illumination in the Choir Books of a North German Dominican Convent, 2 vols. (Munster, 2016), Medieval Cantors and Their Craft (ed. with Katie Bugyis and AB Kraebel) York Medieval Press, 2017, and Cosmos, Liturgy and the Arts in the
Twelfth Century: Hildegard’s Illuminated Scivias (Philadelphia, 2022). Fassler is a member of the North American Academy of Liturgy, a former President of the Medieval Academy of America, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of
America, and an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society. Her digital work includes documentary studies of contemporary congregations. A digital model of creation and cosmos based on the illuminations of Scivias (with Christian Jara) will appear in 2023. These works have been supported by grants from the Luce Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the ACLS. Fassler has been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a fellow at the Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton. In 2019-20, Fassler was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Her recent digital project on teaching and learning the medieval liturgy (with Katie Bugyis and Cara Aspesi) is supported by a grant from Notre Dame’s Faculty Research Program.

Representative Publications, Performances, and Creative Work

• "Women and Their Sequences: An Overview and a Case Study," Speculum 94 (2019): 625-673.
• “Images and Chants for a Digital Model of the Cosmos,” in the Journal of the Alamire Foundation 9/1 (2017): 161-178. “The Victorines and Medieval Liturgy,” in The Companion to the Abbey of St. Victor, ed. Hugh Feiss and Juliet Mousseau, (Brill, 2017), 389-421.
• “Shaping the Historical Dunstan: Many Lives and a Musical Office,” in Medieval Cantors and Their Craft: Music, Liturgy, and the Shaping of History, ed. Katie Bugyis, Andrew D. Kraebel, and Margot Fassler (York Medieval Press of Boydell and Brewer, 2017), 125-150.
• With Jeffery Hamburger, Eva Schlotheuber, and Susan Marti, Life and Latin Learning at Paradies bei Soest, 1300-1425: Inscription and Illumination in the Choir Books of a North German Dominican Convent. 2 vols. Munster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2016.