I hold a cross-appointment with the UBC School of Music and the UBC Arts One program, where I have taught since 1999. My research engages with intellectual and cultural history, with particular attention to music studies in several domains, the history and philosophy of science and technology, and the history of political thought.

Until recently, my work has focused on two principal areas: the relationship between music, mathematics, and early modern science; and the genealogies of inequality, morality, and sexuality developed by Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Foucault. My publications on these topics have appeared in Annals of Science, Perspectives on Science, Modern Intellectual History, Nietzsche-Studien, and most recently in I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. I have also been examining pedagogical institutions and methodologies through their associated genres in music and the humanities: I contributed a chapter on the piano étude to the volume, Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century, and have written an article on the use of the essay at the research-intensive university, which appeared in the special 50th anniversary issue of Higher Education Review. Max Weber’s work has also become a subject of particular interest for me, as well as an important critical resource: I recently completed a chapter on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sociology and genealogy of music for the Oxford Handbook of Max Weber, and I am currently exploring the emergence of, and prospects for ‘educational leadership’ as a vocation, in light of historical and critical perspectives framed both by Weber and by his contemporary, Thorstein Veblen.

In addition to these publications, I have presented papers for conferences hosted by the American Musicological Society, the International Society for Intellectual History, the History of Science Society, the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, SCIENTIAE: Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World, the Columbia History of Science Group, and the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science.

Music theory and history, European intellectual and cultural history, history and philosophy of science.

Articles

Music and the Book of Nature: Vincenzo Galilei on the Conundrum of Musical Consonance
Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publication details: I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 22, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 93-119.
Jun 1, 2019

From Sexuality to Governmentality: The Oedipus Complex of Michel Foucault
Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publications details: Modern Intellectual History 16, no. 1 (2019): 217-49.
Apr 2, 2019

Is the Essay Dead? Research and Writing in the Humanities at a Research-Intensive University
Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publication details: University Higher Education Review 50 no. 2 (spring/summer 2018): 53-85.
Apr 1, 2018

“Pythagorean Pipe Dreams? Vincenzo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, and the Pneumatic Mysteries of the Pipe Organ”
Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publication details: Perspectives on Science 26, no. 1
Feb 1, 2018

Between Aristotle and Lucretius: Discourses of Nature and Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité
Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publication details: Modern Intellectual History 14, no. 1 (2017): 1-33.
Apr 1, 2017

Book Chapters

Max Weber and the Sociology of Music
Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publication details: The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber, edited by  Edith Hanke, Lawrence Scaff, and Sam Whimster. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Mar 1, 2019

Discipline and Pianist: Foucault and the Genealogy of the Étude
Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publication details: Foucault on the Arts and Letters: Perspectives for the 21st Century, edited by Catherine M. Soussloff. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016.
Jan 1, 2016

Review Essays

What Does Science Have to Do with Music?
Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publication details: Annals of Science 2005
Weblink: http://www.academia.edu
Jan 1, 2005

Book Reviews

Review of James Kennaway, Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease
Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publication details: Isis 105, no. 4 (December 2014): 829-830.
Dec 1, 2014

Review of Maria Semi, Music as a Science of Mankind in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Author: Konoval, Brandon
Publication details: Isis 104, no. 3 (2013): 621-22.
Jan 1, 2013