Devin Burke

Biography

Devin Burke is an Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Louisville School of Music, where he is also Interim Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Coordinator of the Musicologies concentration. His research focuses on intersections between early modern opera and discourses of visual culture, colonialism, and idolatry. Much of his scholarship connects to the histories of embodiment and disability studies. His work has appeared in publications including Early Music and the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, and he has a forthcoming article on new discoveries about Jean-Philippe Rameau's Pigmalion in the Journal of the American Musicological Society as well as a forthcoming book chapter in Teaching Global Music History: A Resource Book. His current book project reexamines the eighteenth-century fascination with the myth of Pygmalion to newly illuminate the pivotal roles that operatic and balletic treatments of the myth played in shaping that phenomenon, which the book argues laid important groundwork for Romantic political, philosophical, and aesthetic conceptions of music and of the artist more broadly. 

Dr. Burke is also a commited educator whose teaching and mentorship has been recognized with the UofL TILL Teaching Innovation Award (2025), the Outstanding Faculty Mentor of Master’s Students Award (2020), Student Champion recognition (2021, 2024), and Faculty Favorite nominations (2018, 2021). He is the creator of the Music History Globetrotting Project, a digital resource designed to make the pedagogy of global music history more broadly accessible across a variety of instructional settings and modalities. 

Research Interests

Music and visual culture, opera, film music/sound, musical borrowing and adaptation, music and idolatry, music and politics, early music, Jean-Philippe Rameau, music and disability studies, music in wartime

Degrees and Certifications

Publications

All Scholarly and Creative Works