Obermann Fellowships for the
Summer 2001 Research Seminar

Opera in Context: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Creation, Performance, and Reception

June 11-27, 2001

Supported by the C. Esco and Avalon L. Obermann Fund and by the following University of Iowa organizations: the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the Graduate College.

 

 
This interdisciplinary research seminar focused on the relationship between opera and the social worlds in which, and for which, it was created. Scholars addressed the ways in which individual operas or operatic traditions have shaped, and been shaped by, their publics and the cultural and political circumstances in which they existed. New approaches to opera and new problems in opera studies were particularly encouraged.

A principal aim of the seminar was to bring together scholars drawn from several different disciplines, for example: classics, dance, history, literary studies, musicology, and theater arts. Topics to be addressed might include anything that falls under the following categories: intersections of stage representation and social contexts, transformations of single works for different venues and audiences, operatic works that spawn or respond to other operatic or non-operatic works, performance practices that can be understood as integral to operatic works rather than incidental to them, the politics of opera on film, and reception issues.

Directors

Roberta M. Marvin, Associate Professor and Head of Musicology
Downing A. Thomas, Associate Professor of French and Chair, Department of French and Italian

Fellows

Robert L.A. Clark, Associate Professor, Modern Languages, Kansas State University
Local Color: The Representation of Race in "Carmen" and "Carmen Jones"

Rachel Elizabeth Cowgill, Lecturer, Music, University of Leeds
"Werktreue" and Mozart Productions on London's Italian Operatic Stage

Tili Boon Cuillé, Assistant Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures, Washington University From the Comédie Française to the Opéra

Charles Dill, Associate Professor, Music, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ideological Noises: Opera Criticism in Early Eighteenth-Century France

Grace Kehler, Assistant Professor, English, McMaster University
Wagner and the Ethics of Nineteenth-Century Art

Robert C. Ketterer, Associate Professor, Classics, The University of Iowa
Roman Republicanism & Operatic Heroines in Napoleonic Italy

Waltraud Maierhofer, Associate Professor, German, University of Iowa
Transformations: Anfossi's 'Circe' in Weimar

Anne Williams, Professor, English, University of Georgia
The Mysteries of La nonne sanglante

Visiting Speakers

Wye (Wendy) J. Allanbrook, Professor, Music, University of California, Berkeley

David Levin, Associate Professor, Germanic Studies, University of Chicago

Herbert Lindenberger, Professor, Comparative Literature, Stanford University

Ellen Rosand, Professor, Music, Yale University

Articles Index (password protected, for participants only)