Kendra Preston Leonard is a musicologist and music theorist whose work focuses on women and music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; and music and screen history; and a librettist and poet.

Recent and Upcoming Scholarly Publications, Presentations, and Projects

“Matrices of Musics: Scoring Shakespeare on Screen,” Shakespeare Association of America, “Shakespearean Biofiction on the Stage and Screen” seminar, March 2021.

“White Supremacy in Music for the Silent Cinema,” Society for American Music annual meeting, June 2021.

Recent and Forthcoming Creative Works

One Voice Project Virtual Micro-Opera Festival: five new operas premiering March 22-26.

Sense of Self, a chamber opera with music by composer Lisa Neher.
Composed for two high voices, Sense of Self explores an athlete’s relationship with her body, her ambitions, and her plans after receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer. To be premiered by Opera Elect.

Protectress (novella in verse), Unsolicited Press, forthcoming January 2022.
From the publisher:
Protectress is a hybrid poetry-prose novella offering a risky take on the legend of Medusa. With stunning economy of words and a delicate hand, Protectress provokes us to think about the feminist identity and the power of compassions. Readers who fell deeply for Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Madeleine Miller’s Circe, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Seamus Haney’s or Maria Dahvana Headley’s translations of Beowulf, and Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth will find themselves enamored with Protectress.

Works in Progress

Silenced Voices in Early Film Music

“Nostalgia and Cultural Memory in Scoring for The General (1927)” 

“Jewishness between Performance and Appropriation: Music for The Merchant of Venice on Film”

Leonard’s ORCID is 0000-0003-3005-4344, and you can also follow and engage with her work at Humanities Commons CORE.