Operatic Migrations: Transforming Works and Crossing Boundaries in Musical Drama, ed. Roberta Montemorra Marvin and Downing Thomas (Ashgate, 2006). This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying a wide range of subjects associated with the creation, performance and reception of 'opera' in varying social and historical contexts from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The volume strongly asserts that works are meaningfully transformed by the manifold circumstances of their creation and reception, and that these circumstances have an impact on the life of those works in their many transformations and on a given audience's experience of them.
Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime: 1647-1785 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). My 
study measures a shift in the status of opera within French culture, from an uneasy absolutist vehicle and foil to spoken tragedy in the late seventeenth century, to a spectacle that had turned away from the moral aims of tragedy to embrace new concerns with sensibility and feeling.
Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). This book introduces a dialogue between the philosophical context in which theories of music developed during the eighteenth century and specific "anthropological fictions"--narrative accounts of the origins of human society--that demonstrate the interdependence of reflections on nature, culture, music and language.
Empire and Occupation in France and the Francophone Worlds, eds. A. Donadey, S. Farmer, R. Scullion, D. Thomas, and S. Ungar, a special issue of Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 23.1 (1999).
“Rameau's Platée Returns: a Case of Double Identity in the Querelle des Bouffons,” Cambridge Opera Journal 18.1 (2006): 1-19.
“Negotiating Taste in Montesquieu,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 39.1 (2005): 71-90.
"Philosophy, Science, and Style: Condillac on Buffon and Figurative Language," Common Knowledge 9:2 (2003): 286-310.
"Taste, Aesthetics and Commonality in the Encyclopédie," Using the Encyclopédie: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Reading, SVEC 2002:05 (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford, 2002): 187-209.
"Notes on Performativity and Mood in Le Mariage de Figaro and Le Nozze di Figaro," Ars Lyrica 11 (2000): 115-131.
"Racine Redux?: the Operatic Afterlife of Phèdre," L'Esprit Créateur, special tricentennial issue on Racine, 38.2 (1998): 82-94.
"Architectural Visions of Lyric Theater and Spectatorship in Late Eighteenth-Century France," in Representations 52 (1995): 52-75.
Copyright © 2003 The University of Iowa. All rights reserved. Contact: french-italian@uiowa.edu - Updated 7/29/08