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Research

My scholarly work focuses on twenty-first-century opera performance practice as it relates to contemporary politics and social justice activism. The opera performance canon is filled with outdated and deeply problematic political ideas that increasingly clash with modern sensibilities when performed uncritically. I argue that production and performance are vital elements of opera, and that contemporary opera practitioners not only interpret but create operatic works when they put them onstage.

My monograph, Rape at the Opera: Staging Sexual Violence, is the first extended work to consider contemporary operatic production through an explicitly political lens. Rather than dismiss the political problems of canonic operas as being merely residues of the past, I explore the cultural work these operas do when we perform them today and model a way of evaluating problematic representations in light of contemporary feminist ethics.

Publications

Book

Rape at the Opera: Staging Sexual Violence, University of Michigan Press, Music and Social Justice, 2024.

Article

"Production as Criticism: Staging Wartime Rape in the Opera Canon," Cambridge Opera Journal 35, no. 3 (2023). DOI: 10.1017/S0954586723000125.

Chapter

Forthcoming: "Interpreting Verdi's Operas Today," in Verdi in Context, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Cambridge University Press.​

Conference Participation and
Invited Talks

Invited Talks

  • “Staging Sexual Violence: Rape Culture and the Opera Canon.” Friday Forum of York University’s Graduate Music Student Association, Toronto, 2023.

  • ​“Re-envisioning Opera Studies: Musicology, Dramaturgy, and Activism.” With Rena Roussin. Speaker Series, Brock University, 4 February 2022.

 

Conferences Organized

  •  Music Graduate Students’ Society Symposium, McGill University, 23–25 March 2018.

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Papers Presented 

  • “Rape Culture and the Stone Guest: Mozart's Don Giovanni in the Twenty-First Century.” Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, St. Louis, MI, 9-11 March 2023.

  • “Ceremony and Sistering in Namwayut: Care Ethics, Indigenous Epistemologies, and Dramaturgy.” Feminist Theory and Music, University of Guelph, 7–10 July 2022.

  • “Opera Dramaturgy as Musicological Praxis.” Stitching New Stories: Reimagining Music Theatre, Queens University and the Watershed Music Theatre Festival, 27–28 May 2021. 

  • “Where Do We Go from Here? Ethical Representation On- and Offstage in Opera.” Virtual meeting of the New York State-St. Lawrence chapter meeting of the American Musicological Society, 15–16 April 2021.

  • “Salome as Victim: Representations of Rape and Trauma in Twenty-First-Century Productions of Strauss’s Salome.” Virtual meeting of the American Musicological Society, 7–15 November 2020.

  • “Identifying Sexual Assault in Operatic Repertoire: A Workshop for Music History Instructors.” With Julie Anne Nord. New York State-St. Lawrence chapter meeting of the American Musicological Society, Colgate University, 2–3 April 2020. Conference cancelled due to COVID-19.

  • “‘Poor Mozart!’: Beauty and the Reception of Regietheater,” for Roundtable: “The Work of Beauty in Opera.” Canadian University Music Society (MusCan), University of British Columbia, 5–7 June 2019.

  • “Reimagining the Seraglio in the Twenty-First Century: Staging Violence Against Women in Two Productions of Die Entführung aus dem Serail.” Opera and Violence, Oxford Brookes: Exploring Research Trends in Opera, 11 September 2018.

  • “Trauma at the Opera: Sexual Abuse in Twenty-First-Century Productions of Salome.” Feminist Theory and Music, San Francisco State University, 27–30 July 2017.

  • “Looking for the Light: Symbolism of Light and Darkness in Tristan und Isolde and Pelléas et Mélisande.” Death, Burial and the Afterlife in the Arts and Humanities, University College Dublin, 23–25 June 2016.

  • “Automation and Autonomy: Conlon Nancarrow’s Player Piano and American Musical Politics in the Cold War.” Violation: Representations in Literature and Culture (Graduate Student Conference), McGill University, 20–22 February 2015.

  • “Elysium on the Lido: Platonic Salvation in Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice.” Confounding Expectations: Musical Intersections (Graduate Student Conference), University of Calgary, 28–29 April 2015.

Education

2021

PhD Musicology

McGill University, Montéal QC

2015

MA Musicology

Western University, London ON

2013

BMus Honours Performance (Voice) with Distinction

Western University, London ON

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