Recognized as one of the leading scholars of baroque music, Professor Wendy Heller, is the Scheide Professor of Music and Director of the Program in Italian Studies at Princeton.  Heller, who served as the Music Department Chair from 2015-2022, has published widely on 17th- and 18th-century opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, with emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, Italian literature, dance history and the classical tradition. Author of the award-winning Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice  Heller‘s publications include the innovative textbook Music in the Baroque  and its companion “Anthology of Music in the Baroque.” She was also a co-editor for  Staging History: Historical Drama in Britain and America, 1780–1860  and the volume Performing Homer: The Journey from Epic to Opera.” Recently published articles include “Listening to Baroque Music History” in the award-winning Norton Guide to Teaching Music History, “Bach and the Soprano Voice” in the  volume Rethinking Bach (Oxford University Press, 2021), and “‘Una Lingua Sciolta’: Listening to the Voice of Anna Renzi,” in Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas: Sources, Performance, Interpretation (Routledge, 2022).

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Heller, who also trained as a professional singer, maintains a strong interest in performance, promoting collaborations between scholars and performers, and has been a driving force in the production of baroque operas at Princeton and most recently was dramaturg for Princeton’s groundbreaking virtual production of Cavalli’s  La Calisto  in 2019.  Heller is a member of the editorial board for Francesco Cavalli’s “Opere” (Bären-reiter); her edition of Cavalli’s Veremonda, L’amazzone di Aragona (1652), produced at the 2016 Schwetzingen Festival, will be published in 2023. A member of the board of the American Handel Society, Heller is also editing Handel’s Admeto  for Bärenreiter.  For the past few years, she has also been a faculty participant in the Peking Opera Immersion program, in collaboration with the Program in East Asian Studies. 

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Heller’s current projects include the monograph Animating Ovid: Opera and the Metamorphoses of Antiquity in Early Modern Italy  for University of California Press and is coediting Barbara Strozzi: In Context with Beth Glixon for Cambridge University Press.

Winner of the Rome Prize in Post-Classical Humanist Studies, Heller has also been a Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, a visiting fellow at New College, Oxford, and an appointee at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies.

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Heller, who joined Princeton’s faculty in 1998, holds a bachelor’s degree in vocal performance and a master’s degree in musicology from the New England Conservatory of Music, and a PhD from Brandeis University.