Research/Areas of Interest:

Opera: staging, visuality, theatricality, performance and spectatorship.
Film and Media Studies: sound and music editing; aesthetics and politics of synchronization; aurality of silent film; suture; Foley; Renoir, Ophuls, Visconti and Fellini; music video and animation

Education

  • PhD, Cornell University, USA
  • MA, Cornell University, United States
  • BA, University of Rome "La Sapienza", Italy

Biography

Alessandra Campana works on the interfaces of hearing and seeing in theatre, film, and video. Trained as a cultural and music historian, she has worked on the staging and spectatorship of opera in Italy at the turn of the 20th century, but also on the interaction of staging practices with music in Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Boito, Puccini. She is currently completing a book on film, where she argues that film soundtracks may work to destabilize the central positioning of the viewer/hearer, as posed by classic film theory. She started this project as an Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in Fall 2013 and as a Faculty Fellow of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts in 2014-15. She is a member of the editorial team of The Opera Quarterly, Co-Chair with Anne Shreffler of the Opera Seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Centre at Harvard, and in 2018-19, Chair of the Executive Committee of the Opera Forum at MLA.