David Salkowski is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of North Florida. He received his PhD and MA from Princeton University and his BA from Lewis & Clark College. His research focuses on music in the modern Balkans and Late Imperial Russia with particular emphasis on connections between aesthetics, institutional history, and community formation. His current project aims to uncover the social and political lives of Bulgarian music in the context of the turbulent interwar years. This project considers music—ranging from Orthodox chant to urban popular music to the avant-garde—as reflections of ambiguous relationships to European modernity and its possible alternatives.
His first book, Music for an Imagined Liturgy: Orthodoxy and Community at the End of the Russian Empire, investigates sacred music on the eve of revolution and is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Other recent publications include “Imperialism, sovereignty, and medieval musicology: Ontologies and ideologies of ‘Bulgarian chant’ in the early twentieth century” (The Musical Quarterly, 2026), “Toward a People’s History of Western Music” (Journal of Music History Pedagogy, 2025), and “The ‘Economy of Incarnation’ and the Cherubic Hymn in Nineteenth-Century Russia” (Journal of Musicology, 2024).