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Laura Dolp is a writer, printmaker, music historian, and the founder of Stenen Press. 

Her work converges in a recent series of artist books entitled Sophia, which explores the material history of language and music through her practice of poetry and printmaking. Through a process of lithography and collage, Sophia resembles the layering of ancient palimpsests. Individual volumes are thematic, such her recent “Where I hoped rock would be” (2023), a book that traces megalithic ritual sites and the medieval poetry of Malta. Collectively, they express the consequences of inscription, erasure, and memory.  

A previous project, Book of Hours (2021), features collaged illustrations and poetic text that explore the mythology of place. Modeled loosely on the richly-illustrated devotional texts of early modern Europe, Book of Hours draws widely on sources from Italian, German, Swedish and Arabic literature, as well as music, photographs, architectural blueprints, and geological maps from Europe, Australia and the Americas.  

Laura is a member of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York City and was a 2023 resident artist at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia. 

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As the Founder and Director of Stenen Press, Laura oversees the acquisition, translation, and illustration of a variety of global literatures for English-speaking audiences. By placing acts of translation and the visual arts in alliance to tell stories, Stenen Press provides new avenues of cultural engagement for its readers. Its bilingual editions – which privilege both their original language and English translations – support the idea of the border region as a space of extraordinary creative capacity and provide opportunities to reinvent geo-political and temporal spaces. 

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Laura has also written extensively on the historical agency of music as a site of human transformation. Her academic publications address a variety of themes including music and spirituality, the interrelation of music and social spaces, modes of mapping and musical practices, and the poetics of the natural world. Several studies discuss the creative use and reception of the music of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, including Arvo Pärt's White Light: Media, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), The Oxford Companion to Music and Medievalism (2020), and the Cambridge Companion to Arvo Pärt (2012). She has also contributed to Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis (Oxford University Press, 2016) and the journals 19th-Century Music, Journal of Musicological Research, and altrelettere. Her wide-ranging editorial endeavors include work for the journal Elements of Music Since 1945 and an epistolary account of American experience in Nasser’s Egypt in Letters from Cairo (2021).  

Laura is currently Associate Professor of Musicology at the John J. Cali School of Music, Montclair State University. 

Some of Laura’s other interests include languages (Swedish, Italian and Arabic), playing her cello, and flying. She lives and works in New York City. 

Laura Dolp holds a B.A. from Mills College, a M.A. in Music History and Literature from Boston University and a Ph.D. in Historical Musicology from Columbia University.