Caroline Gleason-Mercier is a musicologist, cultural historian, and opera singer who specializes in French women-composed opera of the eighteenth century. She earned her PhD at King’s College London in 2023 researching the political significance of women-composed opera during the French Revolution (1789-1799). She was recently an Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University from 2023-2024.
For the Turin Humanities Programme, she will conduct research for her manuscript entitled Appropriating Slavery: Women Theatre-Makers of the French Revolution, 1789-1799. This book examines how women composers, librettists, and playwrights of the Revolution drew the analogy of marriage with slavery in their creative texts to equate women’s submissive roles as mothers and wives to chattel slavery. As a scholar and performer, this book includes video links to public performances of this historical repertoire in collaboration with international opera and theatre companies to explore how contemporary productions may stage women-created antislavery theatre to resonate with current efforts to decolonize the performing arts.
