Deirdre Loughridge

Deirdre Loughridge is a music historian who specializes in the history of music and technology. Her scholarship engages with the history of science and media studies to illuminate music from material and multisensory perspectives. She is the author of Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020 (University of Chicago Press, 2023), and co-editor of The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future (MIT Press, 2023).

Loughridge’s book Sounding Human explores how music has been used to continually renegotiate categories of human and machine over the centuries. The Science-Music Borderlands, co-edited with Elizabeth Margulis and Psyche Loui, brings together neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, musicians, historical musicologists, and ethnomusicologists to foster dialogue through which researchers across these fields can mutually benefit from one another’s perspectives and recent developments. Loughridge’s award-winning first book, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow, demonstrates how proliferating optical technologies in the 18th century fueled innovations in performance, listening practices, and ways of thinking and writing about music. Loughridge’s research articles and reviews have appeared in such publications as Eighteenth-Century Music, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Journal of the American Musicological Society, and other musicological journals and edited volumes.

Loughridge is also co-founder and curator, with Thomas Patteson, of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, a web-based project that has been featured in such venues as the Public Domain Review, the San Francisco Center for New Music, and public radio. Their coauthored book on The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments is forthcoming from Reaktion books in 2026.

Loughridge’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, NJ. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago (in music and biology/neuroscience), and Ph.D. in music history from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Northeastern, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Loughridge is also a cellist whose playing can be heard on various albums, including by The Wiggly Tendrils.