Dr. Gabriela Cruz

Biography

Gabriela Cruz is a music historian whose research interests lie at the intersection of opera, theater, technology, and aesthetic politics. She joined the University of Michigan in 2012 after teaching at Tufts University, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and Universidade de Coimbra in Portugal. Cruz's recent book, 'Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera' (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines the transformation of opera into a modern art spectacle facilitated by the introduction of gas illumination and the development of novel visual and musical technologies, particularly phantasmagoria and dioramas in opera theaters from the 1820s onwards. Her essays cover a range of topics including operetta, theater, Verdi, Wagner, Meyerbeer, French grand opera, romantic aesthetics, and early phonography, with contributions to journals such as Cambridge Opera Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music, Opera Quarterly, Current Musicology, Journal of the American Liszt Society, and Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia. Currently, she is pursuing a project on musical comedy from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, investigating the intersections of theater, music, and politics within modern culture. Professor Cruz teaches courses on opera, art-song, history of Western music, and music from Iberia and Latin America, as well as music mediality and the aesthetics of comedy, and is actively involved in the American Musicological Society and the Sociedade Portuguesa de Investigação em Música, collaborating with the Centre for the Study of Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (CESEM) at Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Research Interests