Erin Brooks is a musicologist with research interests in opera, film, race, gender and sexuality, trauma studies, and disability. She earned her Ph.D. in Musicology from Washington University in St. Louis, where her dissertation analyzed relationships between French actress Sarah Bernhardt and fin-de-siécle musical culture. Erin graduated with a B.A. in music, summa cum laude, from the University of Arkansas and taught courses in musicology and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, The Colburn School (Los Angeles), and UCLA. She has also worked with precollege and continuing studies programs at several institutions. In 2016 she joined the faculty of the Crane School of Music, where she now teaches as Associate Professor of Music History. She has received multiple awards at SUNY Potsdam, including the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship (2025) and the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2023).
In her scholarship, Erin has published on opera houses and geopolitics, the operas of Camille Saint-Saëns, the relationship between theater music and early film, and memory and performance in Tosca. She has presented at national and international conferences, including meetings of the American Musicological Society and multiple iterations of the transnational opera studies conference (Tosc@). She is currently writing a monograph connecting listening, identity, and the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. Erin has received grants to conduct archival research at the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Opera Archive, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
In her work on trauma in particular, Erin has presented at national AMS meetings and specialist conferences in the US and Europe. She has organized interdisciplinary panels on trauma and trauma-informed pedagogy, and co-organized the international conference “Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” (2021). She is a founding co-chair of the American Musicological Society’s study group on “Music, Sound, and Trauma,” and member of an international working group on the same subject. She has published on sonic trauma during France’s l’année terrible in Nineteenth-Century Music Review and historical sound studies and trauma in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. She is serving as co-editor of a 2-volume set of essays of music and trauma, and is currently engaged in a larger project on sound, trauma, and the polio epidemic, as well as ongoing work on trauma-informed music pedagogies.
Erin has taught courses on a wide variety of topics, including music history surveys, music appreciation, and musics of the world, as well as seminars on opera, music and games, and music and gender. She has created a number of new courses at SUNY Potsdam, including classes on “Music, Gender, and Sexuality, post-1800,” “Music, Power, and Politics, post-1945,” “Music, Sound, and the Environment,” and “Music, Sound, and Video Games.”
Erin’s performance training is as a violist, and she continues to perform with multiple ensembles throughout New York. She has been a member of the viola section of the Orchestra of Northern New York since 2016, and performs in a variety of contexts from 19th century opera houses to concert halls to front porches with her string quartet, The Carriage House Quartet. Erin is also an enthusiastic viola da gamba player and is thrilled at any opportunity to play consort music.