Devon J Borowski

Devon J Borowski studies the cultural history of song as a practice, object, and idea in the long eighteenth century, with a focus on opera and other forms of vocal music around Great Britain and its colonial empire. His research brings together queer theory, early modern critical race studies, and issues of (de)coloniality to highlight the libidinal investment in voice at the intersection of musical performance, knowledge creation, and social formations of difference. His current book project, Concerts, Camp, and the Coloniality of Song in Romantic Britain, asks how people across the British Empire experienced, thought about, and made meaning out of the singing voice. The book excavates the material and discursive networks running through late Georgian singing culture—stage pieces and song collections, as well as works of history, philosophy, and pedagogy—to explore how they in turn influenced beliefs about the human body and civil society. An early installment of the project, “Camping Empire: Melophilia and the Castrato Voice in Georgian Britain,” was recently published in the Journal of Musicology. Future publications include contributions to the upcoming Bloomsbury Handbook to Queer Romanticism and Cambridge Opera Journal. 

Borowski’s research has been supported by a Predoctoral Fellowship for Excellence through Diversity at the University of Pennsylvania, an LGBT Studies Research Fellowship from Yale, and an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society. Devon holds Master’s of Music degrees in Early Music Performance (Voice) and Musicology from The Johns Hopkins University Peabody Conservatory. As a graduate student, he was a beneficiary of the Eileen Southern Travel Fund through the American Musicological Society’s Committee on Cultural Diversity and later served as a student representative on the Society’s Committee on Race, Indigeneity, and Ethnicity. He received his PhD in Music History and Theory (2023) from the University of Chicago, where he also served as Teaching Fellow in the Humanities and affiliated postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. His dissertation, which investigated colonial discourses of voice, humanity, and history, received the Outstanding Dissertation Award (2024) from the International Musicological Society.