Feller-Simmons, Paul

Paul G. Feller-Simmons

Paul G. Feller-Simmons currently holds the position of Presidential Fellow at Northwestern University, where he is pursuing a PhD in musicology. He holds a Master’s degree in musicology from Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Arts with a concentration in musicology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. In addition to being a Lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Paul is also a member of Northwestern’s Medieval and Jewish Studies. Paul’s research interests primarily lie in early modern music history, with a focus on interdisciplinary approaches to Jewish-Christian musical exchanges, music in the Spanish colonies, and musical othering. He has presented at various international conferences and published on eighteenth-century opera contrafacts at the Amsterdam Esnoga, the reception and adaptation of Handel’s music for the Dutch-Sephardic community, musical semiotics in Chilean colonial villancicos, and Mayan musicianship in the Guatemalan Highlands in the seventeenth century. His research on Italian comedic representations of Jewish masculinity earned him the Irene Alm Memorial Prize awarded by the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music. Additionally, his work on colonial villancicos in Chile was acknowledged with an honorable mention for the Otto Mayer-Serra Award. In 2022, Paul was awarded the American Musicological Society Noah Greenberg Award with Cesar Favila for their contribution to the performance of music from nunneries in New Spain. Paul's research has been supported by the Rolf und Ursula Schneider-Stiftung, the American Musicological Society’s Eugene K. Wolf Travel Fund Award for European Research, and the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music’s Diversity and Inclusion Research Award, among others.