Professor of Music on the Faculty of Arts and Science at New York University, Cusick has published extensively on gender and sexuality in relation to the musical cultures of early modern Italy and of contemporary North America. Her book, Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power, was published in 2009 by the University of Chicago Press, and received the “Best Book” award for 2010 of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. More recently, she has studied the use of sound in detention and interrogation of prisoners held during the 21st-century’s “war on terror.” She is currently working on a book that explores the relationship among the erotic, the sonic and the political in early modern Florence, through a retelling of one of the city’s most notorious sex-and-singing-nun scandals.