Christopher Campo-Bowen

Christopher Campo-Bowen is an Assistant Professor of Musicology in the School of Performing Arts. He completed his Ph.D. in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a B.A. in Music from Stanford University and an M.M. in Orchestral Conducting from The Catholic University of America in Washington D.C.

Campo-Bowen's research focuses on music in the Habsburg Monarchy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially on the relationships between music, ethnicity, gender, and empire. He is particularly interested in how conceptions of ruralness in Czech operas structured notions of subjectivity and identity. His book, Visions of the Village: Ruralness, Identity, and Czech Opera (Oxford University Press 2025), investigates how operatic visions of Czech rural cultures were instrumental in creating ethnonational belonging. He is also a co-editor of the collected edition Women in Nineteenth-Century Czech Musical Culture: “Apostles of a Brighter Future” (Routledge 2024). 

Campo-Bowen is a member of Open the Gates Gaming, a research collective at Virginia Tech that focuses on inclusion and access broadly construed in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). As part of his work with OtG, he is writing a book of Dungeons & Dragons adventures based on operas. He has published articles in the journals Nineteenth-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal, and The Musical Quarterly and presented at various national and international conferences, including the annual conference of the American Musicological Society, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies annual conference, and the biannual Transnational Opera Studies Conference. 

Campo-Bowen received a Fulbright grant for the Czech Republic to perform dissertation research and held a Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship from the American Musicological Society. Prior to coming to Virginia Tech, he was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Music of the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University. He has trained variously as a violist, singer, and conductor, and he still dabbles in these roles to this day.