Jonathan Ligrani joined the musicology faculty at the University of Alabama School of Music in Spring 2023. Prior to arriving at UA, he taught at Columbia University at both Columbia College and the School of Professional Studies. From 2021 to 2022, Jonathan was an Eva Schler Fellow at the Medici Archive Project in Florence, Italy, where he conducted research and contributed to the “Music and the Medici” program, which uncovers and performs sixteenth-century sacred repertoire from Florentine archives in historic spaces throughout Europe.

Dr. Ligrani’s research centers on the Italian madrigal, Renaissance cultural history, and book history. His dissertation, “Manuscript Culture and Patrician Identity in the Florentine Madrigal,” demonstrates that handwritten volumes of madrigals commissioned by magnate families in the 1530s participated in systems of elite self-fashioning that resisted the middle-class tenets of the genre’s contemporaneous print distribution. Jonathan’s additional research focuses on the composer Ottorino Respighi’s ekphrastic representations of Renaissance art within the context of Italian cultural spirituality and nationalism in the early twentieth century. He earned an M.A. in Musicology at The Pennsylvania State University in 2016, writing a thesis on Giaches de Wert’s and Claudio Monteverdi’s development of musical techniques for lament. Jonathan’s publications appear in The Literary Encyclopedia and Current Musicology. He has delivered papers at annual meetings of The Renaissance Society of America and The American Musicological Society, and has presented research throughout the United States, Europe, and Canada. Jonathan has received grants and fellowships from the Renaissance Society of America and the Medieval and Renaissance Studies program at Columbia University.

Dr. Ligrani received his B.A. in Music and studied viola at the University of Northern Colorado. He also sang in the early music ensemble, Collegium Musicum, at Columbia University. He holds memberships in numerous professional organizations and has served on the AMS Committee on Communications, the AMS sub-committee on the Library of Congress Lecture Series, and the editorial board of Current Musicology.