Tim Carter was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1954 and studied in the United Kingdom at the University of Durham and then under Nigel Fortune at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on how music works in the theater, whether in late Renaissance and early Baroque Italy, Mozart’s Italian operas, or American musical theater in the mid-twentieth century. In 2013 he received the Claude V. Palisca Award and the H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for his work on Kurt Weill’s Johnny Johnson and on Monteverdi; in 2015–16 he was a fellow at the National Humanities Center working on “political” musical theater in the United States in the 1930s.
Tim Carter is the David G. Frey Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to moving to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001, he taught in the United Kingdom at the Universities of Leicester and Lancaster, and at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London. He has held fellowships at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence, and the Newberry Library, Chicago, and has occupied various positions within the Royal Musical Association, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, of which he was President (2003-6) and has just been elected Honorary Member. He was also joint-editor of Music & Letters (1992–98) and continues to serve on numerous editorial and advisory boards.