Penn is taking more than just basketball titles from Princeton University this year.
Over the summer, Music professor Carolyn Abbate, one of the world's most prominent musicologists, was appointed the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Music.
Abbate - who spent 31 years at Princeton before coming to Penn - is now teaching History of Opera and a graduate music seminar. Next semester she will teach a freshman seminar on film music, along with another opera-focused graduate seminar.
"[Abbate] is a really wonderful addition to our faculty," said Music department chairman Jeffrey Kallberg.
According to Abbate, her pianist father sparked her lifelong love of music at a young age. She studied piano and eventually developed specialties in opera and film music.
After completing her undergraduate degree at Yale University, Abbate received her Ph.D. in music from Princeton.
Although Penn offered Abbate her first tenured job in 1989, she chose to remain at Princeton for the next 16 years. In 2005, Abbate became the first Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Although Abbate did not come to Penn until this year, she always had a strong connection to the University, she said.
"There's always been a kind of thought lingering there for a long time that someday I might be happy at Penn," she said, adding that the University has "one of the strongest music departments in the country with really stimulating colleagues."
But Penn's students and setting also played a role in drawing her to the University.
Abbate said that she loves the urban atmosphere of Penn's campus and especially enjoys interacting with the University's diverse student population.
While at Harvard, Abbate only instructed students who specialized in music. The undergraduates outside of the Music department that she gets to teach at Penn "bring a very different insight to what we are studying," she said.
She also praised Penn's teaching spaces and advanced technology that allows her to show DVDs, slides and videos in class.
"Even things like what's on YouTube in terms of opera," greatly enhance her lectures, she said.
Abbate's numerous publications include Unsung Voices published in 1991, In Search of Opera published in 2001 and Opera: The Last Four Hundred Years, which is scheduled for publication in 2009.
"This is really an honor," said School of Arts and Sciences Dean Rebecca Bushnell. "It's a remarkable opportunity for us to bring in someone who many people consider to be one of the top musicologists in the country."
