Rachel Ruisard is an independent scholar who received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2021. She also completed a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance at Moravian College with a minor in Medieval Studies (2014), and a Master of Studies in Musicology, with distinction, at the University of Oxford (2015). Rachel studies medieval vernacular song traditions, specifically troubadour and trouvère song, and her dissertation, titled “Women’s Voices in a Fourteenth-Century Chansonnier: Representation and Performance in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308,” investigated the ways in which the female voice was expressed and negotiated in Old French lyrics transmitted in a late medieval Lorraine songbook.

Rachel is a co-author for the “New and Borrowed Chant in New Spain and Mexico” (2017) in Études grégoriennes and has presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies and the Capital Chapter of the American Musicological Society. A recipient of the University of Maryland’s Flagship Fellowship and Ann G. Wylie Semester Dissertation Fellowship, Rachel has also received grants from the Medieval Academy of America, The Cosmos Club (Washington, DC), and the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship.