Dr. Nicole Grimes Named Chair of the Department of Music
The UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts has named Dr. Nicole Grimes, associate professor of music, the next department chair of the Department of Music.
Grimes is an internationally recognized scholar of German music whose research is focused at the intersection between criticism, music analysis, and the aesthetics of German music from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. She is passionate about uncovering the music of women composers who have been lost to history, an enterprise that is central both to her teaching and her research. Her work explores the interdisciplinary relationship between music and philosophy, and music and literature. She has published widely on Brahms, Schoenberg, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Wolfgang Rihm, and Clara Schumann, and topics in music aesthetics. Her most recent book, Brahms’s Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture, addresses the relationship between themes of loss in Brahms’s music and the German intellectual tradition. This book was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2022 Danijela Kulezic-Wilson Book Prize of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and it was one of nine Notable Music Books of 2019 by Alex Ross of the New Yorker.
Grimes is Vice-President of the American Brahms Society, having served on that society’s Board of Directors since 2016. She is a Trustee of the Society for Music Analysis in the United Kingdom and a member of the Team of Advisors of the Women in Global Music (WIGM) Network. She also serves on the Advisory Board for Irish Musical Studies and the Institute of Austrian and German Music Research. She is Series Editor of the New Cambridge Music Handbooks.
Grimes holds a Ph.D. from Trinity College, Dublin, and also studied at Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, and Humboldt University, Berlin. She previously held positions at Royal Holloway, University of London, University College, Dublin and Keele University.
In her new role, Grimes will be in charge of planning department programs related to teaching and research. She will oversee the curriculum and faculty to promote a creative, diverse, and innovative academic climate. She began serving her three-year term on July 1, 2022.
About UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts: As UCI’s creative laboratory, the Claire Trevor School of the Arts explores and presents the arts as the essence of human experience and expression, through art forms ranging from the most traditional to the radically new. The international faculty works across a wide variety of disciplines, partnering with others across the campus. National-ranked programs in art, dance, drama, and music begin with training but end in original invention. Students come to UCI to learn to be citizen-artists, to sharpen their skills and talents, and to become the molders and leaders of world culture. For more information, visit www.arts.uci.edu.
About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is the youngest member of the prestigious Association of American Universities. The campus has produced three Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 222 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $5 billion annually to the local economy. For more on UCI, visit www.uci.edu.