Deirdre Loughridge is a Professor of Music at Northeastern University in Boston, where her research and teaching center on the history of music, science, and technology.

Loughridge’s latest book, Sounding Human: Music and Machines, 1740/2020 (University of Chicago Press, 2023), explores how music has been used to define the nature of, and relationships between humans and machines in the eighteenth century and today. Bridging such historical and cultural work with cognitive science, with Elizabeth Margulis and Psyche Loui she co-edited The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future (MIT Press, 2023). This transdisciplinary collection of essays seeks to foster dialogue between music researchers in the humanities and sciences, and won the Ruth A. Solie award from the American Musicological Society. Loughridge’s first book, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism (University of Chicago Press, 2016), won the 2017 Kenshur prize for outstanding monograph in eighteenth-century studies. The book explores how proliferating optical technologies in the 18th century fueled innovations in performance, listening practices, and ways of thinking about music.

Loughridge’s upcoming book, Bone Flute to Auto-tune: Forty Thousand Years of Music Technology (University of Chicago Press, November 2026), offers a history of Western music through the lens of tools, based on the course she developed on the topic. Loughridge is also co-founder and curator, with Thomas Patteson, of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, a web-based project that has been featured in the Public Domain Review and in a gallery exhibit at the San Francisco Center for New Music. The Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments is a forthcoming book with Reaktion in April/July 2026.

Loughridge’s research articles and reviews have been published in the Journal of Musicology, Eighteenth-Century Music, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Cambridge Opera Journal, Early Music, and other musicological journals and edited volumes. Loughridge also writes for broad audiences, bringing a historical perspective to contemporary issues. Her essays have appeared in such publications as Even Magazine and Art or Sound (Fondazione Prada). Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago (in music and biology/neuroscience), and Ph.D. in music history from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Northeastern, she taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Loughridge is also a cellist whose playing can be heard on various albums, including by The Wiggly Tendrils.