Susan Boynton is Professor of Historical Musicology at Columbia University, where she joined the faculty in 2000. Her research interests include liturgy and music in medieval Western monasticism, particularly the abbey of Cluny; manuscript studies; music in the Iberian peninsula; music and childhood; and intersections of music with the visual arts.

Boynton has published seven books. The first, Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000-1125 (2006), won the Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society. Her second monograph, Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain (2011), won the Society's Robert M. Stevenson Award. Prof. Boynton coedited (with Diane J. Reilly) The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages (2011). Also coedited with Diane J. Reilly, Resounding Images: Medieval Intersections of Art, Music, and Sound (2015) won the American Musicological Society's Ruth A. Solie Award. Boynton's other coedited volumes include From Dead of Night to End of Day (2005), with Isabelle Cochelin, Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth (2006), with Roe-Min Kok; and Young Choristers, 650-1700 (2008), with Eric Rice. Boynton's articles have been published in The Journal of the American Musicological Society, Speculum, Viator, Traditio, and other leading journals in musicology and medieval studies.