John Romey

Dr. John Romey is a specialist of early modern French music, politics, religion, and spectacle; of South American colonial andindigenous musics; and of historical bowed bass instruments, instrumental technology, and historical performance practices. His research has beensupported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Holmes/D’Accone American Musicological Society TravelGrant for travel and research in the history of opera, the American Musicological Society’s M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet Travel Grant, a Herzog-Ernst-Fellowship-Programme Fellowship, a Fritz Thyssen Stiftung post-doc, a Herzog August Bibliothek Short-Term Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and a FritzThyssen Stiftung travel stipend. His current book project, titled “The Games of Gods and Beggars: Ludic Song and Sociability in Early Modern France,”examines the interplay between oral and literate song traditions in early modern Paris. Individuals participating in these separate but interwoventraditions composed new texts to popular songs, known as vaudevilles, and parodied airs from contemporary spectacles, especially from the Opéra. Thisresearch presents new perspectives on how cultural events, from civil wars to an operatic premiere, injected society with new publicly shared artifactsthat individuals manipulated to forge novel expressions of self and agency. His analysis demonstrates that the performance of a staged spectacle onlyconstituted a small portion of its social significance in seventeenth-century Paris because spectacles, like operas, were interactive events thatengendered countless subsequent performative acts. It illuminates the roles played by song across different social groups, from blind beggar-musicianson the Pont-Neuf (the “new bridge” that became a central gathering space and hub for oral and written communication) to fashionable elites atfeminocentric literary salons and at court. Through an analysis of material and performative culture in this period, he offers insight into how tunes servedas tools of cultural mediation and identify formation. He has published an article on street songs and ephemera produced during the Fronde in EarlyModern French Studies (2019); an article on the contribution of Parisian spoken theaters to the tradition of street song in The Journal of Musicology(2020); an article that examines Catholic and Huguenot communal singing and polemical song to argue that during times of political or spiritual crisis, likeduring the Wars of Religion, control of urban soundscapes was a manifestation of power in the Yale Journal of Music & Religion (2023); an article aboutinteractive song games based on operatic quotation and parody in the Cambridge Opera Journal, (2024); and articles about French Renaissance viols inEarly Music History (2025) and the Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America (2025). He is currently serving as guest editor for a two specialissues: an issue of the Yale Journal of Music & Religion about sonic pollution and rites of purification in global spiritual traditions and an issue of Cahiers-Débats—guest edited with Nicholas Hammond (Cambridge University) and Karine Abiven (Sorbonne Université)—hosting a bilingual multidisciplinarydebate on Sound Studies and early modern France. Trained in historically informed performance at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Romey is anexpert on the history of the Viennese Violone and performs professionally on violones and viols of all sizes. He has created a performance-basedresearch project that will reconstruct a consort of French Renaissance viols (https://thefrenchconsortproject.com). While grounded in scholarship, thisproject will culminate in the creation of experiential learning components for students in the music history classroom. The French Consort Project hasreceived financial support from the Viola da Gamba Society of America and Purdue Fort Wayne's Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching(CELT). At Purdue University Fort Wayne, Dr. Romey offers survey courses in global music history, elective musicology courses such as “MUSC 40505:Women and Musical Salons” and “MUSC 40504: American Roots to Modern Popular Music,” and serves as artistic director for the early music ensemble.He also serves as the school of music’s liaison for the university’s honors program.