Dr. Jessica Sternfeld

Dr. Jessica Sternfeld, musicologist, joined the faculty of Chapman University in 2009, and is now Associate Professor of Music.  Her work with students, whether music majors, grad students, or non-majors, focuses on grounding each musical piece in its context, exploring not only the music but its meaning, audience, and cultural significance.  Her courses include the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern eras of Western art music; musical theater on stage, film, and TV; opera; American popular song; and political and social movements in music.  Besides teaching music history and culture, Dr. Sternfeld also serves as the Director of Student Affairs in the Hall-Musco Conservatory of Music; in that capacity, she advises all music majors and minors on courses and career paths.  She especially enjoys teaching music history and culture courses to music majors, and working with first-year students to learn about critical inquiry via musical theater in her FFC.

Dr. Sternfeld is very active in Chapman’s efforts to increase and improve diversity and inclusion on campus, serving on the university-wide Diversity Response Committee among other committees.  She is a proud “Safe Space”-trained faculty member and works to improve the atmosphere of safety and inclusion for all Chapman community members.

Originally from the east coast, Dr. Sternfeld earned a B.A. with Honors in Music from Wesleyan University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton University in 2002.

Her first book, The Megamusical (2006, Indiana University Press), is the first to explore the phenomenon of the blockbuster musicals of the last forty years.  It discusses both the internal workings and the cultural impact of these “megamusicals.”  She has published numerous scholarly articles and chapters on musical theater, including a chapter on revivals, films, and television productions for the Cambridge Companion to the Musical (2008/2017, ed. Laird and Everett) and a chapter on disability in The Phantom of the Opera for the groundbreaking Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (2015, ed. Straus et al).  A chapter on the TV series Glee appears in Gestures of Music Theatre:  The Performativity of Song and Dance (Oxford 2013, ed. Symonds and Taylor).  Other articles have appeared in journals such as Studies in Musical Theatre, for which she has also served as guest editor.  She has given talks at numerous national and international conferences, including Song Stage & Screen, the Society for American Music, the American Musicological Society, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, and the College Music Society.

In 2021, Dr. Sternfeld became the co-editor (with Dr. Elizabeth Wollman, Baruch College, CUNY) of Studies in Musical Theatre, the leading journal in the field. With Dr. Wollman she also co-edited The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical, released in 2019. This collection is the first to focus on recent musicals, through lenses including musicology, theater, dance, cultural studies, media studies, gender, race, and more. Her current work focuses on the intersection between trauma and musical theater, with publications forthcoming.