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Academic Profile
Sophie Benn’s academic investments are rooted in decades spent in the music industry: a career as a cellist and baroque cellist; work as a concert organizer, cello teacher, baroque dancer, and arts nonprofit worker; and in the more distant past, a childhood spent in the ballet studio. She is an assistant professor of musicology at Butler University, where she teaches courses in music and dance history since 1800 in the Jordan College of the Arts.
In her research, Dr. Benn is interested in how people have used music and dance as a form of self-fashioning, articulating and forming their identities in respect to questions of race, gender, and class. Most of her work takes place on the period between approximately 1890 and 1914 in France and the United States. Her current project examines popular engagement with the Argentinian tango in Paris, Chicago, and New York in the years prior to World War I. Previous publications have been concerned with dance on silent film in France, dance notation and theory in the early twentieth century, and historical performance practice.
Dr. Benn is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including an American Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association of University Women, a NEH/Newberry Library Summer Research Institute fellowship, travel grants from the American Musicological Society and the Eva L. Pancoast Memorial Fund, a Graduate Affiliateship at the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and a Case Western Reserve University Fellowship at the Library of Congress.
As a cellist and baroque cellist, Dr. Benn is a frequent performer on faculty recitals at Butler University as well as in chamber music concerts across Indianapolis and the surrounding region. As an interpreter of new music, she served as one of the principal cellists of the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra; has premiered work in the United States, Europe, and Canada; and has collaborated with Joel Sachs, Miranda Cuckson, and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Yarn/Wire, and the Kronos Quartet.
Deeply invested in fostering connections between artists and their communities, Dr. Benn is also in demand as an author of program notes, facilitator of panel discussions, and host of preconcert lectures. She serves as board president for the medieval music ensemble Trobár. Between 2017 and 2021, she was a director of Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project (CUSP), an organization dedicated to new and experimental music that she co-founded with the saxophonist Noa Even. Due to this work, Dr. Benn was named one of the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland’s 2019 New Agents, a group of 52 “experimenters, catalysts, and change-makers, who are pushing Cleveland forward right now.”
Dr. Benn holds degrees in cello performance, pedagogy, and music history from Rice University and the Cleveland Institute of Music. She received her PhD in musicology from Case Western Reserve University in 2021 and has previously taught at Western Kentucky University, the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Case Western Reserve University. A proud Midwesterner, she lives in Indianapolis with her husband Nick, a musicologist who works in the music industry, and their two cats, who have no careers to speak of.