Dr. Anabel Maler is a scholar of music theory with interests in music and disability studies, music in Deaf culture, music perception, embodiment and gesture, post-tonal form, and the intersections of music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology. Anabel was born outside of Ottawa, Ontario, and received her B.Mus and M.A. in music theory from McGill University. She earned a PhD in music theory and history from the University of Chicago in 2018, where she completed a dissertation titled “Hearing Form in Post-Tonal Music.”

Anabel’s current research project is titled Seeing Voices: Analyzing Sign Language Music. This book, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press, provides the first monograph-length analytical methodology for engaging with sign language music, a central musical output of Deaf culture. Seeing Voices argues for taking signed music seriously as an object of analytical inquiry and builds a theoretical foundation for engaging with this music as music, by exploring the history, cultural contexts, and principal musical parameters of sign language music. It reveals that sign language music, rather than being peripheral to music studies, can teach us a great deal about how, when, and why movement becomes musical in a cultural context. In doing so, it adds to the new and growing bodies of literature on Deaf musical culture, music and disability, and musical embodiment and gesture. Anabel has received grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Iowa’s Arts and Humanities Initiative, and the Obermann Center to support the completion of the book.

Anabel’s research on sign language, Deafness, disability, and music has appeared in Music Theory Online, Music Perception, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies. Her work has also recently appeared in translation in the French-language journal Circuit: musiques contemporaines. Her research on post-tonal formal function has appeared in the journal Intégral. She has presented her research at numerous regional, national, and international conferences on music theory and analysis, musicology, and Disability Studies. She previously taught at Indiana University and the University of Iowa.