Dr. Jennifer Walker is an Assistant Professor of Music at Williams College and is a scholar of French music and culture during the long nineteenth century. Her research focuses on the intersections of music, politics, and religion in secular societies. Dr. Walker is also actively researching projects related to gender, opera, and critical reception. Her book Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transformations of Catholicism in the Music of Third Republic Paris (AMS Studies in Music/ Oxford University Press, 2021) was the 2022 winner of the American Musicological Society’s H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Award for an outstanding scholarly work on the musical press, and her second book, Hector Berlioz’s Requiem, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. She is also the co-editor, along with Mark Everist, of the volume Genre and the Production of Gendered Identity on the Lyric Stage (Brepols, 2025). 

She is the author of numerous other articles and book chapters, including those in the Cambridge History of Western Sacred Music from 1500 (forthcoming), Berlioz and His World (2024), Sacred and Secular Intersections in the Long Nineteenth Century (2022), La musique religieuse en France au XIXe siècle (2021), and the Cambridge Opera Journal (2019). She has written essays for the BBC Proms and the Bard Music Festival, has served as the scholar-in-residence for the La Jolla SummerFest, and her work on Berlioz has been translated into French. Her research has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Musicological Society, the West Virginia Humanities Council, and the West Virginia University Humanities Center.

In addition to pursuing an active research program, she is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Musicological Society and is a performing pianist. Prior to joining the Williams community, she was an Associate Professor of Musicology at West Virginia University.