Rebecca Harris-Warrick brings to her primary specialization in the field of French baroque music an interdisciplinary background in musicology, performance, dance history, and literature. Her research also extends beyond the Baroque into later periods of operatic history, particularly in France, and she has prepared critical editions of theatrical works by Gaetano Donizetti and Jean-Baptiste Lully. In addition to her musicological work she has performed as a baroque flutist and studied both renaissance and baroque dance. As a result, much of her scholarly work has been informed by her interests in performance and performance practice and, conversely, some of her research has been brought into practice on the stage, such as in productions of operas at the Boston Early Music Festival. In 2003 she organized performances at Cornell and the Eastman School of Music of Lully's Carnaval Mascarade (first performed at the Paris Opera in 1675) and in 2007 a program entitled Harlequin's Capers, which included the first performance since 1734 of a ballet from the stage of the Théatre Italien in Paris, Jean-Joseph Mouret's Pygmalion.
Rebecca Harris-Warrick is currently a member of the editorial boards for the Les Oeuvres complétes de Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, and has served on the Council of the American Musicological Society (1995-98), the Board of Directors and Editorial Board of the Society of Dance History Scholars (1993-99), and as Associate Editor of the Cambridge Opera Journal (1998-2003). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1985, 1991), the Mellon Foundation (1989), and the Guggenheim Foundation (2001).
At Cornell Rebecca Harris-Warrick teaches music history for non-majors (e.g., Mozart to Minimalism, Opera) and music majors (survey of Western music from the Middle Ages to the Baroque), as well as graduate musicology seminars, freshman writing seminars, and practical courses in early dance. She served for six years as Director of Graduate Studies in Music, and chaired the department from 2002 to 2005 and from 2006 to 2008.
