Academic Background
BA (Hons) (Newcastle), MA (Newcastle), PhD (London)
Professor Alexandra Wilson is a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College. Her research straddles the disciplines of Music and History.
Professor Wilson received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2002. She was a Junior Research Fellow and Lecturer in Music at Worcester College, Oxford (2001-2004) and subsequently the Joanna Randall-MacIver Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford (2004-2005). In 2005 she was appointed to a lectureship at Oxford Brookes University, where she worked until 2024, latterly as Professor of Music and Cultural History. Alongside her position at Jesus, Professor Wilson holds a Research Residency at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Professor Wilson’s first book, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism and Modernity (CUP, 2007), won the American Musicological Society’s Lewis Lockwood Award. Her book Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain (OUP, 2019) was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and her forthcoming book Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (OUP, 2025) was supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. She is a regular cultural commentator, frequently writing for national newspapers and magazines, appearing on the BBC, and working with all the UK’s major opera companies. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2022.
Research Interests
- Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Italian Opera
- Operatic Culture in Modern and Contemporary Britain
- Interwar British Social and Cultural History
- National Identities
Links
Subject notes for courses taught at Jesus College:
See also the Faculty of Music website.