About
Sophie Benn, PhD, enjoys a multifaceted career as a musicologist and cellist. She is an assistant professor of musicology in the Jordan College of the Arts and affiliate faculty in the Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Butler University, where she teaches courses in music and dance history since 1800. Dr. Benn’s academic investments are rooted in decades spent as a musician and, in the more distant past, a childhood spent in the ballet studio.
Dr. Benn’s research centers on topics of dance, identity, and performance practice in France and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You can read more about her current and past research projects here. She 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. 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.” She is also active as a board member of several music nonprofit organizations including the medieval music ensemble Trobár and Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project.
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.