Majel Connery completed a Ph.D. in musicology at the University of Chicago in June 2013. A scholar of contemporary opera, Connery’s academic work explores the relationship between music and movement, and visual aspects of the modern operatic stage. An artist and practitioner, she is also Co-Founder and Executive Director of the NYC and Chicago-based experimental company, Opera Cabal. Composed of a changing collective of artists and scholars, the group serves as a laboratory for new ways of thinking about the formal dimensions of music on stage while simultaneously presenting that thinking in the form of performance. Connery's ongoing creative pursuits with eighth blackbird, Marcos Balter, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw foreground the conjunction of aesthetic theory and performance practice. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Music, Connery’s courses at Berkeley will focus on the conjunction of musicology with the neighboring critical discourses of performance studies and dance studies.