Christopher Campo-Bowen

Christopher Campo-Bowen is an assistant professor of musicology in the School of Performing Arts at Virginia Tech. He completed his PhD in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds a BA in Music from Stanford University and an MM 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 how conceptions of ruralness in Czech operas structured notions of subjectivity and identity. His current book project investigates how urbanites’ operatic visions of Czech rural cultures were instrumental in creating a coherent sense of ethnonational belonging, including works by Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, and Leoš Janáček. 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. He was a member of the UNC Royster Society of Fellows as well as the recipient of a Council for European Studies Mellon Dissertation Completion Grant. 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. He is an avid rock climber and also enjoying hiking, camping, and being outdoors generally.