Dr Valeria De Lucca
Associate Professor in Music
Dr Valeria De Lucca is a Associate Professor in Music at the University of Southampton.
I am the coordinator of the Masters programme in Music and am responsible for Masters admissions for the academic year 2017/18. This means that I oversee our Masters students’ progress from admission to graduation, providing advice and support throughout their course of study at the University of Southampton. At undergraduate level I teach the core first-year modules in music history, as well as modules in Baroque opera and the American musical. In my lectures I always aim to discuss how social, political and cultural contexts influence the ways in which music is produced and consumed. To this end I favour an interdisciplinary approach, in which a musical work is considered in dialogue with the visual arts, literature and other forms of media.
My teaching reflects my methods and approaches to research. My main areas of interest are opera and musical theatre. I have worked extensively on seventeenth-century music and culture, patronage and funding of opera, the role that women played in shaping the cultural life of seventeenth-century Rome, and the staging and visual aspects of the operatic performance. In particular, I recently became interested in stage costumes and the multiplicity of meanings and functions they fulfilled in opera and musical theatre from the late Renaissance to 1900. I regularly deliver papers, give pre-performance lectures and write programme notes on these subjects, and I have recently featured in a BBC 2 documentary on the premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Prague in 1787.
After I completed my MA and PhD at Princeton University, I held an Andrew W. Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Early Career Fellowship at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. I joined the Department of Music at the University of Southampton in 2009 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, and have been a lecturer here since 2011.