Staff Profile
Background
Charlotte Bentley joined the International Centre for Music Studies 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
Research
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.
Teaching
Modules in 2022-2023
Stage 1 - MUS1018: Academic Practice for Music Studies
Stage 2 - MUS2108: Music and Empire
Stage 3 - MUS3066: Opera on the Move
MMus - MUS8168: Studies in Western Art Music
Previous modules
Stage 3 - MUS3030: Musics and Nationalisms
MMus - Elective in Global Music History
Publications
- Bentley C. Mobility as a lens for reading the history of opera in the colonial Caribbean. In: Julia Prest, ed. Colonial-Era Caribbean Theatre: Challenges in Research, Writing and Methodology. Liverpool University Press, 2022. Submitted.
- Bentley C. New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819-1859. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022.
- 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. Wagner on the move. In: Trippett D, ed. Wagner in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. In Press.
- 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 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 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.
- 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.