Prof Susan Rankin

Susan Rankin is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Music at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. Her research interests lie in two directions: on the one hand, the manuscript transmission and forms of writing of music in the early middle ages, and, on the other hand, ritual expressed in music throughout the middle ages. Her most recent publication is a monograph on the music scripts and notations invented by the Carolingians (Writing Sound in Carolingian Europe, CUP 2018), and she has recently finished a second ‘Carolingian’ book (Sounding the Word of God: Carolingian Books for Singers) based on the Conway lectures delivered at the University of Notre Dame Indiana in 2017.  In 2019–2020 she is a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, working with Margot Fassler towards a book in which dramatic modes of action in and alongside the medieval liturgy – from dramatic liturgy of the ninth century to sequences composed in the fifteenth – will be examined.  She was awarded the Dent Medal in 1995 and is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academia Europaea, Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society.