Dr Valeria De Lucca MA, PhD
Associate Professor and Head of Internationalisation in Music
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Dr Valeria De Lucca is an Associate Professor in Music at the University of Southampton and the Head of Internationalisation in Music for the academic year 2019-2020.
I am an Associate Professor and the Head of Internationalisation in Music for the academic year 2019-2020. This means that I oversee our year-abroad, exchange and Erasmus programmes, welcoming incoming students and staff, contributing to international recruitment, and advising our own students who plan to study abroad. 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 master’s 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. 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.
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 2012.