I am a musicologist based at the Department of Music, University College Cork. On this website you can find out more about my research on sixteenth-century Italian vocal music, especially the villotta, a genre of dialect song with origins in northern Italy, and issues of gender, sexuality (sexualities), and eroticism in relation to early modern Italy. My PhD thesis includes transcriptions and translations of books of villotte by Alvise Castellino (1541), Mathias Hermann Werrecore (1548), Antonino Barges (1550), and Filippo Azzaiolo (1557, 1559). I plan to extend my work on gender, sexuality and eroticism in music to encompass other genres of secular vocal music in Italy, including the madrigal and the French chanson, and settings from the Song of Songs.

I am currently engaged in writing on male friendship, gift exchange and the body in sixteenth-century Italy, and in writing up papers on sprezzatura, music and eroticism and on eroticism, decorum and dialect song. I am also coordinating a series of postdisciplinary research seminars on bodies and music to be held at UCC in 2008. My recent activities include organising an international, interdisciplinary conference on Sexualities, Textualities, Art and Music in Early Modern Italy, and presenting a paper at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft, Universität Wien.

I welcome any feedback concerning the site.

Thanks for visiting!

Melanie