The research of Assistant Professor James Davies (Music) explores the ways in which musicology might engage with historians of science in thinking about questions of physiology, neurology and physiognomy in musical performance. Davies' book project, "Romantic Anatomies of Performance," attempts to shift musicological study of the 1830s away from its fixation with 'Ideal Romanticism' and towards 'Material Romanticism.' Pointing out the importance of scientific endeavor to the social practice of music in this era, Davies suggests that the common (romantic) view of Romantic Music as seeking only transcendence, spirituality, other-worldliness or emotional overcoming is overstated. Davies' work focuses on ca. 1830 practices of voice production and keyboard-playing hands in Paris and London. He claims that audiences and listeners there no longer interpret the body as a kind of exemplary musical instrument, a beautiful mechanism to be trained, cared for, sensitized, formed, idealized and then perfectly manipulated. Rather, this body becomes an individualized impediment to or a first condition of expression itself, a gendered agent that must be confronted, known, struggled against, managed and explored.