Elisabeth Le Guin has been a baroque cellist since 1980 and Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of California Los Angeles since 1997. Her book Boccherini's Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology was published by California University Press in 2006; California will also publish a forthcoming monograph on the tonadilla in eighteenth-century Madrid. She is an ardent student of Mexican son jarocho, a traditional verse–music–dance practice with roots in the Spanish Renaissance and African diaspora.