Meet our PhD supervisors: Dr Clair Rowden
Dr Rowden is a graduate of Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and City University where she completed her PhD in 2002 (Massenet, Marianne and Mary: Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera)
Research Interests:
Opera
Nineteenth-century French music
Operatic staging and dance
Press iconography
Operatic parody
Gender
Her research activities range from music editing and archival study to microhistory and reception studies and include operatic staging and dance, iconography and gender. Clair is a member of the AHRC/IMR network 'Francophone Music Criticism 1789-1914' and is responsible for the preparation of on-line editions of various corpora of nineteenth-century French music criticism posted as part of the FMC's creation of a valuable web resource for researchers: http://music.sas.ac.uk/fmc
Meet our staff: Dr Clair Rowden from Cardiff School of Music on Vimeo.
Current projects
- Performing Salome, Revealing Stories, ed. Clair Rowden (Ashgate, forthcoming 2013) – This interdisciplinary volume explores not only the transformation, translation and migration of Wilde’s play across the arts, but also traces Salome’s own phenomenal journey as she took on female embodied form in the illustrated novel, the theatre, the opera house and film during the twentieth century. The volume includes Clair’s chapter ‘Whose/Who’s Salome? Natalia Trouhanowa, a dancing diva’.
- Opera and Caricature in the French fin-de-siècle Press - A study of opera and its cultural mediation at the end of the nineteenth century in France. Humorous drawings, ranging from the classic charge with grotesquely big heads on small bodies, to sophisticated cartoon parody of both opera and its conventions for an initiated audience, reveal the cultural agency of the iconographic press and raise the issues of adaptation and intertextuality, reception and readership.
- Love to Death: Transforming Opera – Clair is organising this international conference in collaboration with Welsh National Opera and the Royal Musical Association. The conference will be held at the Wales Millennium Centre from 31 May – 2 June 2012 and Welsh National Opera’s performances of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde and Puccini’s La bohème will provide central themes for debate. Papers will present a wide variety of subjects, and critical and interdisciplinary approaches from ageing to late style, from Celtic legend to cultural and musical transfer and adaptation, from reception studies to art history, from the ethnography of opera audiences to the psychology of their behaviour, from music theory to performance practice (ancient and modern), from the history of staging to the cultural agency of contemporary opera performed outside of the opera house, and from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.
Selected publications:
- Republican Morality and Catholic Tradition at the Opera: Massenet's Hérodiade and Thaïs (2004). Published in 2004, Dr Rowden’s monogragh is one of the first book-length treatments of French operatic composer, Jules Massenet, in English.
- ‘“Cariculture” in 1890s Paris’, in Antonio Baldassare, Debra Pring and Pablo Sotuyo Blanco (eds.), Enhancing music iconography research: considering the current, setting new trends (Vienna: Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, forthcoming 2012)
- Two chapters on nineteenth-century French choral music, particularly that of David, Gounod,
Massenet and Franck in Donna M. Di Grazia (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Choral Music, Routledge series in Musical Genres, R. Larry Todd, series general editor. (Forthcoming 2012)
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/music/contactsandpeople/profiles/rowdencs.html
Dr Rowden would be happy to consider applications from students considering postgraduate research in the following areas:
Opera and musical theatre (any aspects)
French and Italian nineteenth-century opera
French music and music in France in the long nineteenth century
Reception studies
Gender
Cultural studies dealing with France in the long nineteenth century
Postgraduate funding:
Interested in pursuing postgraduate research at one of the largest and most diverse music schools in the UK? The School of Music is currently offering three competitive Studentships that cover tuition fees at the Home/EU rate. More information on our funding opportunities is available at:
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/music/degreeprogrammes/postgraduate/funding/index.html