Karen Christianson

Karen Electra Christianson is a PhD candidate in musicology at Princeton University, where she works in the Music Cognition Lab and is advised by Prof. Elizabeth Margulis. Her research broadly focuses on listeners’ imaginative responses to music. Her dissertation project investigates "music-evoked kinesthetic imagery": internal sensations of movement that a listener may feel even when not actually moving along. She uses behavioral and computational methods to phenomenologically characterize this experience as it arises during everyday music listening. Her previous work in the Music Cognition Lab used fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of fictional stories imagined while listening to music. Outside of the lab, Karen is involved on campus as a fellow at the AccessAbility Center and as a mentor to undergraduate students in the Music Mentoring Program.

Karen’s approach to music cognition is informed by her background as both a musician and a scientist, having formally trained in organ performance, musicology, and biology. As a concert organist, she has performed at prestigious venues in North America and Europe, including the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and Westminster Abbey in London. Karen completed her undergraduate degree in molecular biology and music at Harvard College, where she served as President of the Harvard Organ Society for three years. She was awarded the Frank Knox Memorial Fellowship from Harvard to complete her Master’s degree in music at Durham University (UK), where she served as Organ Scholar for Hatfield and St. Chad’s College Chapels. Before starting at Princeton, she worked for two years as a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard researching cellular signaling in cancer and neural cell models.