Dr Sean Curran joins the Faculty of Music from July 2014 as a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, having completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley in 2013. His dissertation was on the “La Clayette” manuscript (Paris, BnF, n.a.f. 13521), and the evidence it affords for the vernacular circulation and devotional use of the thirteenth-century motet. He has research interests in the codicology and palaeography of music manuscripts; in the musical analysis and literary criticism of early song; and in new approaches to the historical study of music cognition and affect. At Cambridge, Sean will be writing a book entitled Voices from the Archive: Old Music and the Motet around 1300 CE, which examines changing medieval conceptions of the history of polyphonic song.
Francesca Vella will join the Faculty of Music in October 2014 as a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College. Francesca completed her PhD at KCL, with a thesis about Verdi reception in Milan during 1859-81. Her research interests focus on nineteenth-century opera (particularly Italian) within urban culture and its role in shaping both local and national identities. Francesca’s postdoc project will explore opera and italianità in late-nineteenth-century Italy through a number of local case studies. She also aims to further her passion for transnational studies by investigating the impact of foreign views of Verdi, Italian politics and Italian music on the emergence of the composer’s political myth.