Cesar Favila’s work resides at the intersections of music, religion, gender, and race and often examines how the sacred and the profane animate beliefs about salvation. He is currently researching the penitential songs called saetas through the lens of sound and voice studies. His book, Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain, is the recipient of the 2024 Best First Book Award from GEMELA and available open access. It weaves traditional methods in historical musicology with arguments from the history of religion and art, literary studies, and critical theory to argue that women were elevated as co-redeemers when they became nuns. Favila’s other published work can be found in 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 has also worked with early music ensembles to bring rarely heard New Spanish convent music to live performance and was awarded the American Musicological Society’s Noah Greenberg Award, together with Paul Feller-Simmons, for his practice-based collaboration with Tonos del Sur in the 2023 Bloomington Early Music Festival. Favila has also received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), and the Fulbright Program, among other granting agencies. His teaching has been honored with a UCLA Undergraduate Research Week Faculty Mentor Award.

Favila received a BA in music from UC Davis and an MA and PhD in music history and theory from the University of Chicago.