Georgia Cowart, Ph.D., is a professor of music at Case Western Reserve University. She has published three books and a number of articles on music, art, and cultural politics in early modern France. Her most recent book, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (University of Chicago Press, 2008), focuses on the shifting intersections of the arts, ideology, and aesthetics at the court of Louis XIV and in Paris c. 1650-1720.

As 2007-09 Sylvan C. and Pamela Coleman Memorial fund Fellow in Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, she pursued a research project on Watteau and the musical theater. She also served as guest curator of the Met exhibition “Watteau, Music & Theater” (Fall 2009).

Professor Cowart has also received a number of teaching and research awards, as well as fellowship support from the NEH (2001-02, 2011), the American Council of Learned Societies (1997-98), and the Stanford Humanities Center (2011-12). She has presented her work and chaired panels at conferences, symposia, and international seminars in France, England, Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, Norway, and the U. S. From 2002-07 she served as chair of the department of music at CWRU and co-director of the Joint Music Program between CWRU and the Cleveland Institute of Music. From 2006-09 she served as president of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, and currently serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2009-15).