Prof. Karen Desmond
Karen Desmond is Professor of Music at Maynooth University; before that appointment she was a Full Professor and Chair of the music department at Brandeis University. Karen’s research as a historical and digital musicologist delves into the aesthetics, theories, and technologies that underpinned medieval music-making. She is currently the Principal Investigator for a 2-million-euro ERC-funded project titled BROKENSONG that examines polyphonic singing and written musical culture in medieval Britain and Ireland. She has also been awarded several fellowships and grants for her research from the NEH, including her digital musicology project Measuring Polyphony. Her monograph on the French ars nova, Music and the Moderni, 1300–1350 (Cambridge University Press, 2018), won the American Musicological Society’s 2019 Lewis Lockwood Award. Her second monograph, Organizing Medieval Alleluyas: Music Analysis and the Creative Process in Late Medieval Britain, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.
Dr Johanna-Pauline Thöne
Dr Johanna-Pauline Thöne is a postdoctoral researcher and musicologist at Maynooth University, specializing in the analysis and reconstruction of fourteenth-century polyphony. Her broader interests include fragmentology and digital reconstructions, palaeography, repertory transmission, philology, and the cultural history of the late Middle Ages. Johanna holds Bachelor’s degrees in harpsichord performance (HMT Leipzig) and Greek and Latin Philology (Leipzig University) and a Master’s degree in Musicology (JGU Mainz). She received her PhD from the University of Oslo in 2024 with a thesis entitled ‘Papal Polyphony during the Great Western Schism (1378–1417): How Music Dedicated to Popes Absorbed and Reflected a Time of Crisis’. She has presented her research at numerous international conferences, including the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, the International Symposium on Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Music (Kloster Neustift/Novacella), the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, and the International Medieval Congress at Leeds.
Dr Eric Nemarich
Dr Eric Nemarich is a postdoctoral researcher and historian at Maynooth University. Eric holds a PhD in Medieval History from Harvard University, where he defended his thesis, ‘Zealots of Justice: Coercive Officials in Late Medieval Italy’, in August 2024. His scholarship, drawing upon the archival riches of late medieval Italy, England, and France, uses the techniques of social history to reconstruct premodern communities of knowledge and expertise. As a member of the BROKENSONG team, Eric studies the institutional environments, ecclesiastical and secular, in and around which polyphonic music-making flourished between 1150 and 1350. He also collaborates with the Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME), a digital humanities project at Harvard University.
Inês Nunes Trindade
Inês Nunes Trindade is a PhD student at Maynooth University (ERC Grant, 2024-28), where she is writing her doctoral dissertation on the plainchant of Worcester Cathedral under the direction of Professor Karen Desmond. Inês holds a Bachelor’s degree in Musical Sciences and a Master’s degree in Historical Musicology from the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (NOVA-FCSH). She completed her MA dissertation, ‘Communion Antiphons: Liturgical and Musical Identity in the Sources of Braga and Guimarães, 12th-17th centuries’, under the supervision of Professor Elsa de Luca. Inês collaborates with the Early Music Study Group at CESEM (Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical), where she is a member of the project ‘Echoes from the Past: Unveiling a Lost Soundscape with Digital Analysis’. At CESEM, she contributed to the projects ‘The Musical Manuscripts of the Belém Monastery’ and, with a Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) Grant, ‘Texts and Voices Lost and Found: Recovering, Reconstituting, and Recreating Musical Fragments (c.1100-c.1600)’.
Shristi Rajbamshi
Shristi Rajbamshi is a Research Assistant at Maynooth University, where she works on multispectral imaging, image processing, and data management to support the study of medieval music manuscripts for the ERC-funded BROKENSONG project. Shristi has a background in electrical engineering and signal processing and is pursuing a PhD at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), Austria. Her doctoral research focuses on audio signal processing, sparse signal representations, and computational methods for signal reconstruction. Her research interests include signal and image processing and techniques for recovering information from complex or degraded data. As part of the BROKENSONG team, Shristi applies her expertise to the acquisition, processing, and analysis of multispectral images, with the aim of enhancing the visibility and legibility of text and musical notation preserved in damaged manuscript sources.