STS Colloquium Brandon Konoval

Dr. Brandon Konoval joined the faculty of the UBC School of Music in 1998 and is cross-appointed with the UBC Arts One Program, where he teaches humanities and intellectual history, with a particular focus on the history and philosophy of science. His doctoral research was devoted to the music of Béla Bartók, addressing the middle period works for the piano in terms of the emergence of Bartók’s mature, ‘hard’ style—the fulfillment of the composer’s ambition to write music “of bone and muscle” that nonetheless relied upon an intricate reconstitution of tonal forms in a post-tonal framework. More recent projects include the influence of music and the science of harmonics on mathematical empiricism of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the relationship between conjectural history and natural history of the same period; and genealogies of society, morality and sexuality of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, particularly through the writings of Rousseau, Nietzsche and Foucault.

Dr. Konoval has published articles in Annals of Science, Perspectives on Science andNietzsche-Studien, with work on Rousseau’s Epicurean critique of Aristotle’s Politics in press for Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge). He has presented papers for conferences hosted by the American Musicological Society, the History of Science Society, the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, SCIENTIAE: Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World, the Columbia History of Science Group, and the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science. Reflecting upon his longstanding commitment to education in the humanities, he is currently exploring the relationship between liberal studies and the modern research university from a historical perspective, and particularly in light of the writings of Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen.

Areas of Interest

Music theory and history, European intellectual and cultural history, history and philosophy of science.