My scholarly interests center primarily in seventeenth-century ("Baroque") German literature and culture, with emphasis on literary texts designed to be sung (opera, cantata, love songs, and devotional songs) and otherwise performed (drama and various sub-dramatic forms). In addition to numerous articles on these subjects in German, British, and American journals and in edited collections, I have published four books on German seventeenth-century drama and opera, including the survey of German Baroque Drama for the Twayne World Authors Series and, most recently, A Language for German Opera: The Development of Forms and Formulas for Recitative and Aria in Seventeenth-Century German Libretti.
My current research program focuses on a late seventeenth-century noblewoman, Aemilie Juliane von Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, wife of a ruler of a small central German principality. Many of her nearly 700 song texts form a sort of diary without dates in which she records her thoughts and feelings about the events in her life. Others reflect her social action for the betterment of the life of her female subjects. In particular, her songs for pregnant and birthing women, as well as midwives, are significant sources for her activities. In addition to a recent series of articles on her and other women who likewise wrote devotional songs, I have nearly completed a book-length women’s history monograph to be titled Aemilia Juliana: A Woman’s Life in Early Modern Germany.
Scholarly and teaching interests also extend to medieval literature, women’s literature of the period through 1740, medieval and early modern mysticism, and aesthetic issues related to performance (including oral literature, song, opera, and drama) and versification (including history of verse forms and word-music relations).
