Research

I am a specialist in eighteenth-century opera, with secondary research and teaching interests in popular music, nineteenth-century music and aesthetics, and African music.

In my dissertation, Story and Representation in Handel's Operas, I propose a new framework for understanding Handel’s operas, investigating the complex relationship between the performance enacted on the operatic stage and the story it represents. In an important departure from traditional opera seria scholarship, I take into account not only “dramatic” representation (in which an opera’s story is imparted by means of the onstage singer-actors engaging in mimesis), but also “para-dramatic” expression (information conveyed by alternative operatic “voices,” whether choric, authorial, or otherwise). It is my hope that my ongoing work in this area will contribute to the development of an interpretive paradigm that more fully appreciates the richness of Handel’s operatic oeuvre, neither forcing it to conform to the historically dominant models of opera criticism nor dismissing its unfamiliar conventions as dramatically “weak.” My work is broadly interdisciplinary in approach, drawing upon seventeenth- and eighteenth- century intellectual and philosophical writings, examining primary source materials which illuminate aspects of the composition and initial reception of these operas, and employing relevant modern theories of opera, literature, and drama. I have presented portions of my research at the annual meetings of the American Handel Society and American Musicological Society, and will present once again to the American Handel Society in Princeton this coming March. I have publications forthcoming this year in the Göttinger Händel-Beiträge, and in Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association, and am at work on an article on Handel’s use of birdsong in his dramatic works.