Dr. Diane Oliva

Biography

Diane Oliva is a musicologist who engages with the history of sound studies and Atlantic history, focusing on the transatlantic histories of music listening in the eighteenth century. Her doctoral dissertation, 'Earthquakes and the Eighteenth-Century Musical Imagination,' examines the sonic repercussions of four significant earthquakes—Lima (1746), Lisbon, Boston (1755), and Santiago de Guatemala (1773). Through her research, she investigates how these earthquakes altered the landscape of musical practices at their respective epicenters in subtle and profound ways, and how music shaped experiences and knowledge of these events. Funded as part of the CLIR/Mellon Foundation Fellowship, she has conducted archival research in Guatemala, Peru, Portugal, and Spain. Diane was also a postdoctoral fellow in USC’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities, where she developed her dissertation into a book manuscript and began preliminary work on a new project tentatively titled 'Sonic Mappings: Nature and Empire in Colonial Guatemala,' which explores how music and listening were integral to colonial geographical surveys of Guatemala’s diverse landscapes and indigenous populations. Her research and teaching interests encompass global music history, Central American history, Latin American popular music, eighteenth-century music, and the relationship between music and nature.

Research Interests