Specialization

I am an Associate Professor of Musicology at UCSB, and my research focuses on the critical history of opera and early modern music history. In both my research and teaching I explore how musical cultures carry histories, and how our histories and social realities are shaped and inflected by expressive practices. I am the author of Opera’s Orbit: Musical Drama and the Influence of Opera in Arcadian Rome (Cambridge, 2011), former co-editor of Cambridge Opera Journal, and a past director of the Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music at UCSB. Most people have something to say about music, which is why it is a great subject to engage students and create timely and important conversations across the humanities. My areas of expertise and interest have offered a rich source for diverse and interdisciplinary teaching projects. In 2019-2020, I was a faculty fellow in the Engaging Humanities Program (supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) and created one of the program’s Discovery Courses, “Exploring Voices,” that I co-designed and co-taught with three other graduate student fellows. Also in 2019-2020, I participated in the Ondas Faculty Development Seminar, which inspired new approaches for developing inclusive practices and research-based methods in my teaching.