Professional Activities

[Kate Helsen]

What follows is a resume of my professional activities. A complete C.V. may be found at www.helsen.org.

After having successfully defended my ph.D. thesis ("The Great Responsories of the Divine Office: Aspects of Structure and Transmission" freely available at: http://www.opus-bayern.de/uni-regensburg/frontdoor.php?source_opus=1031&la=de) at the University of Regensburg, supervised by David Hiley, in July 2008, I moved back to my native Canada to begin teaching at the University of Toronto in the Music History and Culture department. I will also be teaching a graduate course in medieval musicology at the University of Western Ontario in the coming semester.

I am a research assistant for several chant research projects, including: the CANTUS Project (http://publish.uwo.ca/~cantus/), the Becket Project (http://becket.ca/), Nota Quadrata (http://www.notaquadrata.ca/), and The Liturgical Veneration of Irish Saints in Medieval Europe (not yet online; please contact Ann Buckley at the University of Maynooth for more information).

My own post-doctoral research will be funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the next two years. I am currently working to develop a database of medieval musical manuscripts which can be securely dated within 25 or 30 years between the end of the 11th and the beginning of the 13th centuries. This will help me compare notation types through the very interesting transitional period from neumes to quadratic notation in various geographical locations. I would welcome tips from anyone to help my database grow (it contains about 130 items currently, mostly taken from the indices that Van Dijk, Frere and Samaran have compiled, along with other library catalogues and reference works such as Analecta Hymnica.)

A curriculum vitae, including a bibliography of articles I have published and conferences at which I have given papers, may be found at www.helsen.org.

When not researching or teaching, I may be found singing: I have been a member of the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir (http://www.tafelmusik.org/about/choir.htm) for four years.