UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The Committee for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) will present a lecture by Wendy Heller, professor of music and director of the program in Italian studies at Princeton University. Heller's lecture, "Sylvan Fantasies: The Locus Amoenus in Seicento Opera," will be at 4 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26, in Palmer Lipcon Auditorium, Palmer Museum of Art.
"Heller will discuss Baroque gardens, music set and performed in garden spaces, and the revival of myths from Ovid that relate to these types of spaces," said Robin Thomas, director of CEMS and associate professor of art history.
Heller specializes in the music of the 17th and early 18th centuries, with emphasis on the study of opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, particularly gender and sexuality, dance, art history and the classical tradition. Author of the award-winning "Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice," the first major study of gender and sexuality in Italian baroque opera, Heller’s has earned numerous fellowships and prizes from such organizations as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gladys Krieble Delams Foundation. Winner of the Rome Prize in Post-Classical Humanist Studies, Heller has also been a been a Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, a Visiting Fellow at New College Oxford, an appointee at the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies (as winner of the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars) and was also the Sylvan C. and Pamela Coleman Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2014, she was appointed an Old Dominion Professor through the Council of the Humanities at Princeton.