Dr. Paul Feller-Simmons
Assistant Professor of Music (Musicology)
Email: pgfellersimmons@ou.edu
Paul Feller-Simmons is a musicologist whose research studies the sonic and musical cultures of the early modern Western Jewish and Iberian worlds. His current book project, "(Re)sounding the Hebrew Nations: Music and Sephardic Community in the Dutch Republic," examines the musical lives of early modern Sephardic Jews in the Netherlands and investigates how aurality functioned as a mode of self-definition across the Dutch colonial sphere.
Feller-Simmons is co-editor of The Virgin Mary’s Essence in New Spanish Song (Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music) and the forthcoming critical edition Villancicos from the Maya Highlands: Seventeenth-Century Vernacular Sacred Music from the Huehuetenango Manuscript Collection (A-R Editions). His recent scholarship includes “‘Sounding the Nação’: Eighteenth-Century Italianate Music, Aural Conversion, and Acoustic Community Formation at the Amsterdam Sephardic Synagogue” (Min-Ad, 2025) and “‘Hoy al Portal ha venido’: Nativity Scenes and the Galant Style in the Christmas Villancicos of the Cathedral of Santiago, Chile (c. 1770–1820),” published in Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review (2024).
Feller-Simmons’s research has been supported by fellowships and awards from institutions including the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Herzog August Bibliothek, the Max Weber Stiftung, the New Netherland Institute, and the Leo Baeck Institute. He is the recipient of the 2022 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society, the 2022 Irene Alm Memorial Prize from the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, and the 2024 Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Award from the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music.
Originally from Chile, he earned his BA in Music from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and his MA and PhD in Musicology from Northwestern University, where he was a Presidential Fellow.
