About

Tekla Babyak, tbb8@cornell.edu

Disabled Independent Scholar with Multiple Sclerosis

Tekla Babyak received her PhD in Musicology from Cornell University in 2014, supported by a Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. Currently based in Davis, CA, she is an independent musicologist and disability activist with multiple sclerosis. She has not found stable employment in the ableist workforce. However, she is very active in terms of presenting at conferences, publishing her work with major university presses, giving invited guest lectures at universities, and serving on committees for the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, and the Modern Language Association.

Her work falls broadly into two categories: disability activism in the academic humanities, and research on 19th-century musical aesthetics. As described in her Current Musicology article, “My Intersecting Quests as a Disabled Independent Scholar,” she offers practical and philosophical ideas about how to uplift disabled voices in academia. She often serves as a consultant to help university presses develop policies to support disabled authors.

As an interdisciplinary scholar, Tekla works on philosophical aesthetics, hermeneutic analysis, and theology in 19th-century music. Her interests include musical temporalities of regeneration as expressed through harmonic and formal processes in Beethoven, Berlioz, Liszt, and Brahms. Recent publications have appeared in Journal of the Royal Musical Association; Bibliotheca Dantesca; Current Musicology; Historians Without Borders: New Studies in Multidisciplinary History (Routledge); and Rethinking Brahms (OUP). Across her wide variety of research fields, Tekla always brings an activist-oriented perspective to her projects. Openly disclosing her MS in her contributor bios for her publications, she aims to show that a disabled independent musicologist can make a meaningful contribution to academic scholarship and social justice.