PhD, Cornell University

BMus, McGill University

ARCT, Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto

Catherine Mayes received her PhD in 2008 with concentrations in musicology and music theory from Cornell University, where her studies were supported by a Sage Fellowship and by a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (for Hungarian) from the U.S. Department of Education. Cornell’s Department of English awarded Catherine the Guilford Prize for the highest excellence in prose for her dissertation Domesticating the Foreign: Hungarian-Gypsy Music in Vienna at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century.

Catherine has presented her research on exoticism and national styles in European music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries at numerous national and international conferences, and her work is published in Eighteenth-Century Music, Music & Letters, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, The Cambridge Haydn Encyclopedia, and Consuming Music: Individuals, Institutions, Communities, 1730–1830 (Eastman Studies in Music, University of Rochester Press), a volume of essays she co-edited with Emily H. Green. Catherine won the Westrup Prize, awarded annually for “an article of particular distinction” published in Music & Letters, for “Eastern European National Music as Concept and Commodity at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century” (February 2014 issue). In 2018, she was awarded the Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching from the University of Utah’s College of Fine Arts.

Before joining the faculty at the University of Utah, Catherine served for three years as Visiting Assistant Professor of musicology and music theory at the University of Notre Dame.