Georgia J. Cowart is a musicologist and cultural historian whose work explores how music, theater, and the visual arts shaped the political and social imagination of early modern France. She is Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University, where she has served as chair of the Department of Music and interim chair of the Department of English. Before coming to Cleveland, she taught for two decades at the University of South Carolina.
Her research ranges from early French musical criticism to the spectacles of Louis XIV’s court to French opera and ballet and the paintings of Antoine Watteau. Throughout her work, she has been interested in the ways entertainment could serve royal power while also making room for satire, dissent, and transformative visions of society.
Her books trace these questions across different periods and art forms. The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (University of Chicago Press, 2008) examines the court’s use of performance as a political instrument and the subtle criticism of absolutist power in later public performances. Her new book, After the King: Watteau, Spectacle, and the Poetics of Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2026), follows the legacy of that culture in Watteau’s art. She has also written on French musical criticism and aesthetics, contributing to scholarship in musicology, art history, and eighteenth-century studies.
In 2009, Cowart served as guest curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Watteau, Music & Theater, which brought paintings and other objects into conversation with live music and dance. She has lectured at museums and universities across the United States, Europe, and Australia, and has shared her work with wider audiences through radio, television, and stage performance.
A committed teacher and mentor, Cowart has received university teaching awards and recognition for her work in writing instruction. She served as president of the American Musicological Society from 2022 to 2024. Her research has been supported by residential fellowships at Stanford University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. In October 2026, colleagues will gather at Case Western Reserve University for a conference honoring her career.