Dr. Eric Bianchi is Assistant Professor of Music at Fordham University in New York City. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2011. His research explores the intellectual and scientific contexts of music during the Early Modern period, with particular focus on the musical writings of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. He was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2008-2009.
Christopher Browner is the Associate Editor at the Metropolitan Opera and served as Opera Critic for the Columbia Daily Spectator between 2012 and 2016. In addition to his writing, he has directed operas in New York and Connecticut and regularly gives guests lectures for the Columbia University Music Department.
Elena Ciletti is Professor Emerita of Art History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she has taught Renaissance and later periods, women artists, and African-American art. She has published on the patronage of the last Medici, Anna Maria Luisa (1667–1743), and on representations of Judith by Artemisia Gentileschi and others. She is working on a book on Judith’s iconography in Counter- Reformation Italy.
Mary Elliot is a Lonergan Graduate Fellow at Boston College and a research assistant at the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good.
A native of Canada, Professor Bruce Gordon taught at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where he was professor of modern history and deputy director of the St. Andrews Reformation Studies Institute, before joining the Yale faculty in 2008. Gordon teaches and supervises graduate students in a broad range of medieval and early modern subjects and their resonances in contemporary historiography and society. In 2012 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich.
Kelley Harness is an Associate Professor of Music and Head of Musicology/ Ethnomusicology at the University of Minnesota. Her publications include Echoes of Women’s Voices: Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence; “Judith, Music, and Female Patrons in Early Modern Italy,” in The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies across the Disciplines; and “‘Nata à maneggi & essercizii grandi’”: Archduchess Maria Magdalena and Equestrian Entertainments in Florence, 1608–1625,” in «La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola d’Alcina»: Räume und Inszenierungen in Francesca Caccinis Ballettoper. She is currently writing a book on the seventeenth-century balletto a cavallo (horse ballet) in Florence.
Scott Lykins is the artistic and executive director of the Lakes Area Music Festival in Brainerd, MN.
Jeremy Rhizor is a violinist, the artistic director of the Academy of Sacred Drama, and the publisher of the Academy Journal. He dedicates his time to exploring the world of sacred dramatic music and searching for appropriate boundaries in our understanding of the communal and individual nature of humanity.
Dr. Ann Plogsterth has a doctorate in art history from Columbia University and a lifelong obsession with religious iconography.
Dr. Michael Schulman (PhD Physics ‘88) is an Orthodox/Hassidic Jew who has served since 1999 as Executive Director of the charitable organization Ask Noah International, and its web site Asknoah.org. Dr. Schulman is co-author of the book Seven Gates of Righteous Knowledge: Spiritual Knowledge and Faith for All Righteous Gentiles.
Anthony Ssembaya is the founder of the Kirabo Doors of Hope Foundation. His foundation empowers youth — especially girls — in Uganda by offering them a solid educational foundation. Tony is an Ugandan national, studied at the Universität Leipzig in Germany, and has worked at the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative in the United States.
Abigail Storch is a master’s candidate in religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. She currently serves as the editorial intern for religion at Yale University Press and performs internationally with Schola Cantorum, the university’s premiere graduate chamber ensemble.
Jane Tylus is Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at NYU. A specialist in late-medieval and early-modern European literature, her most recent books are Siena, City of Secrets (Chicago, 2015) and the co- edited Early Modern Cultures of Translation (with Karen Newman; Philadelphia, 2015). She is the General Editor of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance.
Rev. Kevin K. Wright is an ordained United Methodist elder and the Minister of Education at The Riverside Church in the City of New York.
Jude Ziliak is a violinist specialized in historical performance practices. Widely active as a chamber musician in repertories from the Renaissance to the present, he is a member of the American Bach Soloists in San Francisco and Sonnambula and the Clarion Society in New York. A graduate of the Juilliard School, he teaches at the Special Music School, New York’s public school for musically gifted children. He writes program notes for such organizations as Lincoln Center, Music Before 1800, and the Portland Baroque Orchestra.