Professor Benjamin Walton

As a student, I studied at the universities of Cambridge (BA) and Sussex (MA), before moving to the University of California, Berkeley for my doctoral research, where I completed a dissertation on musical culture in Paris during the 1820s, supervised by Mary Ann Smart. After Berkeley, I held the Kathleen Bourne Junior Research Fellowship at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and then took up a lectureship in Music at the University of Bristol. I joined the Faculty at Cambridge in 2006.

My research interests centre on the social and cultural history of music during the nineteenth century.  My recent work has focused on operatic globalization, with an emphasis on touring opera troupes beyond Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, on the reception of Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini, on the historiography of nineteenth-century music, on the intersections of opera and science in the nineteenth century, and on technologies of operatic staging.

My first monograph, Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007, and I have edited three essay collections: The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini (CUP 2013, with Nicholas Mathew), Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination (CUP 2019, with David Trippett), and Gioachino Rossini, 1868-2018: la musica e il mondo (Fondazione Rossini, 2019, with Ilaria Narici, Emilio Sala and Emanuele Senici).  From 2013-2018 I served as editor of Cambridge Opera Journal, with Stefanie Tcharos.

Recent and current PhD students have worked on a variety of topics: opera in Milan during the 1860s (Carlos del Cueto), music in French New Wave cinema (Denice McMahon), musical culture in Berlin around 1800 (Katherine Hambridge), cultural transfer of European music in Chile, Peru and Bolivia in the first half of the nineteenth century (José Manuel Izquierdo König), ideas of nationalism and pan-Americanism in early 20th-century Latin American opera (Vera Wolkowicz), French opera in New Orleans during the 1830s, '40s and '50s (Charlotte Bentley), Italian opera in Milan, Buenos Aires and New York in the decades around 1900 (Ditlev Rindom), Charles Garland Verrinder and nineteenth-century synagogue music in Britain (Danielle Padley), the singer and composer Manuel García in Mexico during the 1820s (Francesco Milella), music and society in late eighteenth-century Jamaica (Wayne Weaver), material histories of operatic props (Shadi Seifouri) and opera in Naples during the 1860s and 1870s (Terence Sinclair).