CATHERINE MAYES

Dr. Catherine Mayes specializes in the music and culture of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe, with a focus on Viennese engagement with Eastern Europe and its music at that time. Her book Hungarian Dances and Musical Life in Eighteenth-Century Vienna is a social history of a unique facet of the city’s diversity, illuminating how it shaped everyday experiences, individual and collective identities, and boundaries of belonging from approximately 1750 to 1810, with particular attention to the mediating and intersecting effects of gender and class on cross-cultural encounters.

Catherine’s research and teaching have been funded and recognized by numerous grants and awards from the American Musicological Society, U.S. Department of Education, Cornell University, and the University of Utah. For her article “Eastern European National Music as Concept and Commodity at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century” (February 2014), she won the Westrup Prize from Music & Letters (Oxford University Press) for “an article of particular distinction.” She was the 2018 recipient of the University of Utah College of Fine Arts Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching and the 2025 recipient of the Faculty Excellence Award in Research.

Before joining the faculty at the University of Utah in 2012, Catherine taught at Ithaca College, Cornell University, and the University of Notre Dame.