Senior research fellowship success
3 February 2023
Dr Barbara Gentili, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Music, has been appointed to a three-year senior research fellowship at the University of Surrey.
The programme will allow Dr Gentili to build an international network of scholars, practitioners and representatives of the cultural industries, and forge long-term collaborations.
Her research project will examine the interaction between the singer’s performing body and recording technologies, and the impacts that this interaction had on constructions of gender, identity and class throughout the twentieth century.
From the phonograph to the sound-on-film, Dr Gentili will explore how the various recording technologies influenced the dialogue between operatic and popular singing, including the relation between singing and acting, thereby reframing scholarship in the Humanities and Creative Art Practices.
Dr Gentili says: “I’m very excited about this opportunity, which gives me the chance to create an important and much needed research centre for mediated sound in voice studies. I was able to conceive of this new idea only thanks to Cardiff University, which hosted my Leverhulme Fellowship on the performance of femininity at the dawn of the recording industry. I have benefited enormously from the first-class mentorship of Professor Clair Rowden, to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude, and I would also like to extend my thanks to my colleagues at the School of Music.”