Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis is Professor at Princeton University, where she directs the Music Cognition Lab. Her research approaches music from the combined perspectives of music studies and cognitive science. Her book On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (Oxford University Press) received the Wallace Berry Award from the Society for Music Theory, and the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. Her book The Psychology of Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press) was published in 2018 and has been translated into Spanish, Hungarian, Japanese, and is forthcoming in Chinese, Arabic, and Thai. Her book The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future, co-edited with Psyche Loui and Deirdre Loughridge, is forthcoming from MIT Press. Her cross-cultural research on narrative perceptions of music is supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation. She has been a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar.
She is Past President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC), and has served on the Board of Directors and as Treasurer. She has also served on the Executive Board of the Society for Music Theory (SMT). Her work has been featured in media outlets ranging from NPR (Science Friday and All Things Considered) to the BBC.
She has a B.M. in piano performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Veda Kaplinsky, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Before coming to Princeton, she was Distinguished Professor at the University of Arkansas. She has also served as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, UK and as a faculty member at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.