Dr. Ruth Longobardi
Assistant Professor of Music and Critical Studies Professor Ruth Longobardi is Assistant Professor of Music and Critical Studies. Her classes focus on critical and cultural approaches to opera and on late-twentieth century and contemporary Western art music, and her seminars include Music and Identity, Opera and Collaboration, and The Politics of American Opera. In addition to her teaching, Professor Longobardi serves on the advisory boards of American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Prior to coming to the University of Richmond in 2004, Professor Longobardi earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her dissertation, Models and Modes of Representation in Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice: Analytical, Historical, and Ideological Contexts, earned the 2004 Philip Brett Award from the American Musicological Society. Professor Longobardi is currently writing a social history of contemporary American opera, entitled Re-Presenting the Real in Turn-of-the-Millennium America: Contemporary Opera, American Icons, and Technologies of Sonic Representation. The book investigates icons, including Malcolm X, Patty Hearst, and Harvey Milk, who circulate rapidly across genres in the cultural Imaginary, and in large part through sound.
102 Webb
Office: (804) 484-1586
Teaching:
Critical Studies in Music History 1 and 2
Music Scenes (FSVP): Special Topics on Mozart and Opera Performance
Seminars on Music and Identity and Opera Studies
Research:
Social and political facets of contemporary American opera
Opera and the politics of collaboration
Music and identity in late-century England
Education:
Ph.D., Columbia University
M.A., Columbia University
B.A., Columbia University
Selected Publications:
"Re-producing Klinghoffer: Opera and Arab Identity before and after 9/11" Journal of the Society for American Music 3/3 (summer 2009).
“Using Dreams to Explore Silence: Wakonda’s Dream Premieres in Omaha.” NewMusicBox, The Web Magazine from the American Music Center (April 2007).
“Reading Between the Lines: An Approach to the Musical and Sexual Ambiguities of Death in Venice.” The Journal of Musicology 22 (2005): 327-364.
Multivalence and Collaboration in Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice.” twentieth-century music 2 (2005): 53-78.
Review: “Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts” by Daniel Albright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Current Musicology 73 (2004): 207-14.
“Repetition and Return: Music’s Challenge to Mimesis in Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice.” Music Research Forum 17 (2002): 2-32.