Cesar Favila’s work resides at the intersections of music history, art, and religion, and it often examines how the sacred and the profane animate beliefs about salvation. 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, and literary studies. 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, and performance.

His 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, is the recipient of the Natalie Zemon Davis Prize of the Sixteenth Century Society and the Best First Book Award from GEMELA. It was also recognized for its exceptional scholarship in religion and the arts by the American Academy of Religion. 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 co-published an open access 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.

Favila is a multi-award-winning scholar and teacher, having earned grants and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the ACLS, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, the American Academy of Religion, the Academy of American Franciscan History, and the Society of American Music, among others. In 2022, he was honored as a Mellon Emerging Facutly Leader. Favila’s teaching has been recognized with a UCLA Undergraduate Research Week Faculty Mentor Award and an inaugural Faculty Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring Award from the UCLA Division of Graduate Education.

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 ombudsman and church organist. He 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.