About the College
HArCS
About the Dean
Dean Jessie Ann Owens.
Jessie Ann Owens is dean of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies in the College of Letters and Science and professor of music. She came to UC Davis in July of 2006.
Owens was trained as a classicist, with a major in Latin from Barnard College (B.A. 1971). An organist and choral singer, she combined her love of music with her interest in history and chose to pursue an academic career in musicology. She received her M.F.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University, in 1975 and 1978, respectively.
Owens is best known for her work on compositional process in Renaissance music. Her 1997 book Composers at Work: the Craft of Musical Composition 1450-1600 (Oxford University Press), which received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, is the first systematic investigation of composers' autograph manuscripts from before 1600; it offers a view of the conceptual foundations of musical language. Owens's interests include music historiography, the sixteenth-century madrigal, the history of theory, mode and the analysis of early music. She has published articles about Renaissance composers, including Josquin des Prez, Cipriano de Rore, Luca Marenzio and Giaches de Wert, and served as series editor of Criticism and Analysis of Early Music.
Owens is currently continuing her investigation of tonal language by examining English music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is making the key texts available as series editor of Critical Editions of Music Theory in Britain 1500-1700 (Ashgate) and is editing the treatise by Charles Butler, The Principles of Musik (1636).
Before coming to UC Davis, Owens had served as Louis, Frances and Jeffrey Sachar Professor of Music and dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University, where she had taught since 1984. She had previously taught at the Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester) and Columbia University as a Mellon Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. She also received fellowships from the Villa I Tatti, (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence) and the American Council of Learned Societies. Owens was a long-term fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1998-1999, and a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2006.
Owens served as president of the American Musicological Society from 2000 to 2002 and as president of the Renaissance Society of America from 2002 to 2004. In 2003, she was elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Owens has a number of hobbies and interests outside of work, including sports and gardening. A cat lover, she has given a home to two (formerly) feral kittens, Maddy and Gus.
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