Cesar Favila’s work resides at the intersections of music history, art, religion, gender, and race, and it often examines how the sacred and the profane animate beliefs about salvation. His research and teaching focus on Mexican music from colonial New Spain to the contemporary Chicano experience. His transhistorical and interdisciplinary interests weave traditional work in historical musicology, such as transcription and translation of primary sources, with arguments from sound and voice studies, global music history, colonial studies, Latin American Studies, literary studies, and critical theory. He is currently researching the penitential songs called saetas sung in Franciscan missions and in Andalusian Holy Week. Favila is also developing scholarship on the soundscapes of contemporary Spanish-speaking Catholic worshipers through a community-engaged project focused on the connections between popular devotion, liturgy, performance, and liberation theology, titled “Music of the Brown Church.”

His first book, Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain, published open access with Oxford University Press’s Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music series, argues that women were elevated as co-redeemers when they became singing nuns in colonial Mexico. It is the recipient of the Best First Book Award from the Grupo de Estudios Sobre la Mujer en España y las Américas, pre–1800 (GEMELA) and the Natalie Zemon Davis Prize of the Sixteenth Century Society, honoring its contributions to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Favila’s practice-based research has led to collaborations with early music ensembles to bring rarely heard seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexican convent music to live performance, for which he received the American Musicological Society’s Noah Greenberg Award together with Paul Feller-Simmons with whom he will co-publish a critical edition titled The Virgin Mary’s Essence in New Spanish Song in the Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music. His other written works are published or forthcoming in various peer-reviewed journals, including Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, the Bulletin of the Comediantes, Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review, the Journal of the Society for American Music, and Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. He is also a contributor to The Routledge Companion to Race in Early Modern Artistic, Material, and Visual Production.

Favila is a multi-award-winning scholar whose work has been generously supported through grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), the Fulbright Program, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, the Society for American Music, the American Academy of Religion, and the Academy of American Franciscan History, among others. His teaching has been recognized with a UCLA Undergraduate Research Week Faculty Mentor Award. The interdisciplinary nature of his research and teaching has led Favila to serve on various UCLA faculty advisory committees, such as the CMRS: Center for Early Global Studies, the Center for 17th– & 18th–Century Studies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the Chicano Studies Research Center, the Latin American Institute, LGBTQ Studies, and the Center for the Study of Women/Barbara Streisand Center..

Favila received a Bachelor of Arts degree in music from the University of California, Davis and a Master of Arts and PhD in the history and theory of music from the University of Chicago. Outside of musicology, he has previously worked in nursing and in graduate medical education administration, as well as having been employed as an ombudsperson and church organist. He strongly believes that music studies can offer valuable transferrable skills to students with realistic expectations about diverse job markets and with a broad subset of professional skills.