Assistant Professor

Kelly Maynard earned a B.M. in bassoon performance at the Eastman School of Music before turning to modern European history at UCLA, where she completed the Ph.D. in 2007. She joined the faculty at Grinnell in 2009 after having taught at UCLA, Loyola Marymount University, and Scripps College. Her current scholarship traces the impact of Richard Wagner's music and ideas on French politics, culture and society from 1870 through the First World War, and her research interests include the methodological challenges of the cultural history of music, Franco-German relations and cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the uses of early photography in European colonial projects. She is also an avid amateur potter, occasional chamber musician, and great lover of cats.