Alison Altstatt

Alison Altstatt is a historian of medieval chant. Her research has focused on the music and ritual of Benedictine convents, the genres of sequence and proper office, and medieval manuscripts and their twentieth-century reception. She has presented her work to the American Musicological Society, the Cantus Planus study group of the International Musicological Society, the College Music Society, the International Congress on Medieval Studies, the Medieval Academy of America, the North American Academy of Liturgy, and the Working Group on Religious Women in Medieval Europe (Arbeitskreis geistliche Frauen im europäischen Mittelalter.) Her most recent publications have identified and analyzed a thirteenth-century manuscript processional from the English convent of Wilton Abbey that had been missing since 1860. This manuscript is the subject of a book-in-progress titled Wilton Abbey in Procession.

Altstatt holds an M.A. in History from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in Musicology with a second field in Historical Performance Practice from the University of Oregon. Before coming to UNI, she served as instructor of Musicology and Early Music performance at the University of Oregon and Western Oregon University, and as Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. She has also given numerous invited workshops on the performance of medieval chant. In May 2018, she was the H.P. Krause Visiting Research Fellow at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where she conducted research on English medieval liturgical music manuscripts in the Otto F. Ege collection.