Alexandra Kieffer

Alexandra Kieffer is Associate Professor of Musicology and Associate Vice Provost for Academic Programs at Rice University. Her work centers on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French musical and intellectual culture. Her first book, Debussy's Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2019), explores ideas about the psychology of emotion and sensory experience in the reception of Debussy's music. More recently, her work has focused on theories of music and ritual in twentieth-century social science. At Rice, she is a member of the committee currently working to reform the undergraduate general education curriculum.