The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music Department of Musicology is pleased to announce that Cesar Favila has joined the school as Assistant Professor. His fields of study include Latin American musics, Mexican music, early modern music, sacred music, and women’s music.
A California native, Favila did his undergraduate work at UC Davis and holds a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where he wrote a dissertation that explored the musicking and lifeways of cloistered nuns in 17th– and 18th-century Mexico. He is currently working on a monograph, which will be the first to address Novohispanic women’s sacred music and its intersections with urban culture, gender, race, mysticism, and other fine arts. Favila has published in Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos and Musicology Now, and has a forthcoming article in the Journal of the Society for American Music.
“We are delighted to welcome Cesar into the department and school,” said Elisabeth Le Guin, chair of the Department of Musicology. “His research on Mexican convent life complements and expands Musicology’s existing specialties in a way we haven’t seen since the days of Robert Stevenson, who was on the UCLA musicology and music faculty from 1949-1987. It’s especially important for a music school based in Los Angeles to maintain and develop active connections with LatinX history and culture. We look forward to the lively historical and musical perspectives that César will bring to students in our department and beyond.”
Favila’s work has been funded by the Academy of American Franciscan History, the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, and the Fulbright Program. In 2018, Favila was a Thoma Visiting Scholarship in Latin American Colonial Art for a research residency at UT Austin’s LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections.
Favila also serves as a core faculty member of the UCLA Center for 17th– & 18th-Century Studies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. He is a member of the Faculty Advisory Committee for the Chicano Research Studies Center and is a member-at-large of the American Guild of Organists.