Dr. Michael Carlson is Lecturer of Musicology at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. He earned his Ph.D. in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A Renaissance and Baroque Italian specialist, his dissertation, “Musica Fatta Spirituale”: Aquilino Coppini, Claudio Monteverdi, and Madrigal Contrafacts in Early Seventeenth-Century Milan,” explores the genre of Milanese spiritual contrafacts by reading them through the lens of Coppini’s rhetorical and poetic practices based on the poet’s own syncretic sense of religious affectivity.  Informed by archival research and interdisciplinary approaches to music, literature, art, and religious studies, a close reading of these works demonstrates new intertextualities that connect a network of Humanists linked by a highly elaborate form of Milanese syncretism joining the sacred and the secular. Coppini’s contrafacts place Monteverdi’s music within a Milanese constellation of texts (musical, artistic, and literary) that sought to confront the rapidly changing world of the early seventeenth century. His archival research in Northern Italy has been supported by The Renaissance Society of America’s Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship and UNC-CH’s program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies.  

Dr. Carlson is an actively engaged scholar who has presented his research at numerous international and national conferences as well as invitations to . He earned his B.M. in music history from The Catholic University of America, (Washington, DC) and began graduate studies by completing the S.T.B. and S.T.L. from the Pontifical Gregorian University (Rome, Italy). He went on to earn a M.M. in music history from The University of Hartford (The Hartt School) with a master’s thesis that analyzes Domenico Zipoli’s mission-opera, San Ignacio de Loyola, re-contextualized through the lens of Jesuit spiritual practice. His research interests include Post-Tridentine Milan, opera, historical listening, and gender/sexuality studies. He has taught courses in ethnomusicology, musicology, music theory, and popular music.