Nathan Shields received his doctorate in Composition from the Juilliard School, where he also served for several years on the Music History faculty. Last year he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at St. Olaf College. His research interests include Romantic and Modernist music, with an emphasis on Wagner and fin-de-siècle Vienna; sacred music of the late medieval and early modern eras; and music’s relation to the history of philosophy and religious thought. As a composer he has received fellowships and commissions from Tanglewood, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Fromm Foundation, and his musicological writing has been supported by grants from Juilliard and  the Presser Foundation. He has written for Mosaic magazine and Perspectives of New Music, and his music has been performed by the JACK and Jupiter String Quartets, Metropolis Ensemble, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, among others.