During her year as a Townsend Fellow, Kate Van Orden, Assistant Professor in Music, will work on a project entitled "Music and Military Virtue in Early Modern France." Van Orden argues that in the period of her research music was used as an instrument of the king in a civilizing process aimed largely at bringing the unruly nobless d’epée under control. Avoiding what she call musicology’s “Italian bias,” Professor Van Orden intends her study to explain the particular relationship between music, dance, comportment, and nobility in a French culture still inclined to judge nobility of character through physical signs and deeds. Kate Van Orden, who also studied historical performance practice and baroque bassoon in The Hague, Netherlands, completed her Ph.D at the University of Chicago in 1996 and has been at Berkeley since 1997.