Emily Wilbourne

Emily Wilbourne specializes in Italian theatrical music and sound during the seventeenth century, and in questions of embodiment, performance, race, gender, and sexuality. Her first book, Seventeenth-Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte, was published in 2016 by Chicago University Press, and an edited collection in honor of Suzanne G. Cusick appeared as a special issue of Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture in 2015. Dr. Wilbourne’s articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Women & Music, Recercare, Teatro e storia, Italian Studies, Echo, and Workplace, as well as in several Oxford Handbooks. She authored the Oxford Bibliographies entry on “Music and Gender and Sexuality.” In 2011, Dr. Wilbourne was awarded the Philip Brett Award for excellence in queer music scholarship for her article, “Amor nello specchio (1622): Mirroring, Masturbation, and Same-Sex Love”; in 2017-18, she was the Francesco De Dombrowski Fellowship at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence. Since 2017, Dr. Wilbourne has been Editor-in-Chief of Women & Music.​

Recent Publications

• “Breastmilk, Exposed Bodies, & the Politics of the Indecent,” Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 14.1 (2016): http://www.echo.ucla.edu/volume-14-1-2016/article-breastmilk-exposed-bodies-politics-indecent/
• “The Queer History of the Castrato,” The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, ed. Fred Everett Maus and Sheila Whiteley (2018): http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793525.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199793525-e-14

REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS

• “Lo Schiavetto (1612): Travestied Sound, Ethnic Performance, and the Eloquence of the Body.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 63.1 (2010): 1–44.
• “Amor nello specchio (1622): Mirroring, Masturbation and Same-Sex Love.” Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 13 (2009): 54–65.
• “‘Isabella Ringiovinita’: Virginia Ramponi Andreini before Arianna.” Recercare 19 (2007): 49–73.
• “‘Verginia Andreini, detta Florinda’ tra soggettività biografica e soggettività rappresentata.” Teatro e storia, ed. Annamaria Cecconi and Roberta Gandolfi, 28 (2007): 394-406.
• “The Future of Academia is on the Line: Protest, Pedagogy, Picketing, Performativity.” Workplace 14 (2007): 9–30; http://www.cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/.
• “Bibliography of recent queer musicology,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd. ed. Ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas. New York: Routledge, 2006. 379–389.