Dr Valeria De Lucca MA, PhD
Associate Professor of Music
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Dr Valeria De Lucca is the Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes in Music for the academic year 2020-2021.
In my role as Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes in Music I oversee the design and delivery of our MMus pathways (Composition, Musicology, Music Education and Performance) and MA in International Music Management.
I am an enthusiastic communicator and I teach subjects I am passionate about, including the undergraduate first-year modules in music history, as well as modules in Baroque opera, the American musical, and the postgraduate module Artists and Repertoires. I am interested in how social, political and cultural contexts influence the ways in which music is produced and consumed, in historical contexts as well as today. 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 worked extensively on seventeenth-century music and culture, patronage and systems of production, the role that women played in shaping the cultural life of seventeenth-century Rome, and the Roman urban soundscape. More recently, I became interested in nineteenth-century operetta, and in particular the reception and adaptation of foreign music-theatrical genres in Italy and Great Britain. I regularly deliver papers, give pre-performance lectures and write programme notes on these subjects, and I recently featured in a BBC 2 documentary on the premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Prague in 1787.
I am currently co-supervising a number of PhD projects on theatres and institutions in Europe, opera singers and their repertories, musical instruments, cultural transfer and opera studies.
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 at the University of Southampton since 2012.