Staff Profile

Charlotte Bentley joined Newcastle University as Lecturer in September 2021, having previously been a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, an Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, and a Teaching Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She holds degrees from the University of Cambridge (BA, PhD) and the University of Nottingham (MA), and she is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Charlotte's monograph, New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819-1859, was published by the University of Chicago Press in November 2022: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo183950423

New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819-1859 was awarded the American Musicological Society's H.Robert Cohen / RIPM award in 2023: https://www.amsmusicology.org/news/656055/2023-AMS-Award-Winners.htm

My research focuses on operatic mobility in the nineteenth century, using the translation of opera into non-European environments as a way of examining questions of international cultural transfer in the period more broadly. So far, I have worked on New Orleans, which was home to the first (and, for some thirty-five years, the only) permanent opera company in North America, and recruited its performers each year from Europe. I have explored the city’s place within growing global operatic systems, arguing for the centrality of human agency to the long-term development of transatlantic networks of production, as well as the role of material culture in promoting an increasingly international operatic discourse. At the same time, I have sought to understand the more distinctively local aspects of the city’s operatic life, in terms of the theatre-going experience and the adaptation/reception of particular works. I am in the early stages of a new project about operatic networks between the Americas in the nineteenth century, which will explore the ways in which operatic translocation might challenge dominant narratives of nineteenth-century globalisation. My other research interests include Jules Massenet, operatic realism, and the influence of media technologies on the production and reception of opera in the late nineteenth century. 

I welcome enquiries from potential MLitt and PhD students and postdoctoral applicants - please contact me at charlotte.bentley@newcastle.ac.uk.

Modules in 2024-2025

Stage 1 - MUS1018: Academic Practice for Music Studies

Stage 2 - MUS2108: Music and Empire

MMus - MUS8168: Cultural Histories of Music

Previous modules

Stage 3 - MUS3066: Opera on the Move

Stage 3 - MUS3030: Musics and Nationalisms

MMus - Elective in Global Music History

Doctoral supervision

I invite expressions of interest from prospective doctoral students.

Current PhD students: Olivia Childe (Revivals and Colonial Legacies at the Paris Opéra, 1828-1883)

• Articles

  • Bentley CA. Beyond Verismo: Massenet’s La Navarraise and ‘realism’ in fin-de-siècle Paris. Journal of the Royal Musical Association 2019, 144(1), 29-54.
  • Bentley CA. 'The Race for Robert and other Rivalries: Negotiating the Local and (Inter)national in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans’. Cambridge Opera Journal 2017, 29(1), 94-112.

• Authored Book

  • Bentley C. New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819-1859. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.

• Book Chapters

  • Bentley C. Wagner on the move. In: Trippett D, ed. Wagner in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, pp.321-330.
  • Bentley C. Mobility as a lens for reading the history of opera in the colonial Caribbean. In: Prest J, ed. Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre: Challenges in Research, Writing and Methodology. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023, pp.37-59.
  • Bentley C. Southern Exchanges: Italian Opera in New Orleans, 1836-42. In: Körner A; Kühl P, ed. Italian Opera in Global and Transnational Perspective: Reimagining Italianità in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp.113-132.
  • Bentley C. 'Brise du Sud': American Identity and War in the Popular Sheet Music of Francophone New Orleans. In: Hallman D; Leal C, ed. America in the French Imaginary. London: Boydell and Brewer, 2022, pp.149-171.
  • Bentley C. ‘The Unstoppable March of Time: Carmen and New Orleans in Transition’. In: Clair Rowden and Richard Langham-Smith, ed. Carmen Abroad: Bizet's Opera on the Global Stage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp.130-142.
  • Bentley C. Between the Frontier and the French Quarter: Operatic Travel Writing and Nineteenth-Century New Orleans. In: Suzanne Aspden, ed. Operatic Geographies: The Place of Opera and the Opera House. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, pp.105-118.