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Francesca Vella

Assistant Professor

Department: Humanities

I was born and raised in Italy, where I studied Art, Music and Performing Arts at the University of Florence and piano at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, before moving to the UK to complete an MMus and a PhD at King’s College London. Before joining Northumbria, I was a Junior Research Fellow (St John’s College) and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (Faculty of Music) at the University of Cambridge. I’ve also taught at Oxford Brookes, Goldsmiths and Bristol.

Francesca Vella

  • opera
  • 19th-century musical cultures
  • voice
  • staging
  • histories of listening
  • Italian cultural studies

My research considers histories and technologies of operatic performance across the 19th and early 20th centuries. I’ve published articles on Giuseppe Verdi and Italian nation-building, operatic mobility, vocal celebrity culture, and early radio. My first monograph, Networking Operatic Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2021) explores how networks of opera production and critical discourse enabled by new transport and communications technologies shaped Italian cultural identities during the years immediately preceding and following the country’s unification in 1861. I’m currently working on an article on the critical language of operatic staging (at the intersection with cinema) at the 1930s Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and on a new book about mise-en-scène and the visual arts in early twentieth-century Italy.

My growing interest in sonic and auditory cultures has led to the establishment of the ‘Sounding (Out) 19th-Century Italy’ research network (2019-20), funded by a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award. I was also a founding member of the Leverhulme network ‘Re-imagining italianità: Opera and Musical Culture in Transnational Perspective’ (2016-19), based at UCL and with collaborators at Cambridge, Brown University and Universidade Estadual de Campinas. 

  • Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
  • Networking Operatic Italy, Vella, F. 29 Nov 2021
  • Broadcasting the Italian Voice’s Broadcasting: Opera and Italy on the Air, 1920s-1930s, Vella, F. 8 Aug 2022, In: Journal of Modern Italian Studies
  • De(Railing) Mobility: Opera, Stasis, and Locomotion on Late-Nineteenth-Century Italian Tracks, Vella, F. 23 Oct 2018, In: Opera Quarterly
  • Jenny Lind, Voice, Celebrity, Vella, F. 1 May 2017, In: Music and Letters
  • Tamagno Otherwise: Verdi, ‘Ora e per sempre addio’ (Otello), Otello, Act II, Vella, F. 1 Jul 2016, In: Cambridge Opera Journal
  • Milan, Simon Boccanegra and the Late-Nineteenth-Century Operatic Museum, Vella, F. 2016, In: Verdi Perspektiven
  • Bridging Divides: Verdi’s Requiem in Post-Unification Italy, Vella, F. 2015, In: Journal of the Royal Musical Association
  • Verdi and Politics (c. 1859-61), Vella, F. 2014, In: Studi verdiani
  • Verdi’s Don Carlo as Monument, Vella, F. 14 Mar 2013, In: Cambridge Opera Journal
  • Not in their Minds, Vella, F. 1 May 2020, In: Journal of the Royal Musical Association

Public engagement

I’ve written programme notes for institutions including Glyndebourne, Royal Opera House, Scottish Opera and Liceu Opera Barcelona; articles for Opera magazine; and performance reviews for bachtrack.com.

  • Music PhD July 01 2014
  • MPhil January 01 2011
  • BA (Hons) July 03 2009
  • Fellow (FHEA) Higher Education Academy (HEA) 2019


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