Profile

Biography

Áine Sheil studied Music and German at Trinity College Dublin and Historical Musicology at King’s College London. Her PhD thesis (2004) was on the performance and reception of Wagner’s Meistersinger von Nürnberg during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933). Following her doctoral studies, she worked for three years in the Publications Department of the Royal Opera House, London, and in 2006 she joined the Department of Drama at Trinity College Dublin as a postdoctoral research fellow. Here, she taught an introductory course on opera, carried out research on opera in Ireland and developed a keen interest in theatre and performance theory. As a Lecturer in Music at University College Cork (2008-2009) she taught several undergraduate courses (‘Critical Theory and Music’, ‘Music Theatre and Politics’, ‘Exploring Opera’) and contributed to several modules in the MA in Music and Cultural History. She has been a Lecturer in Music at the University of York since 2009.

Research

Overview

• The Staging of Opera
• Theatre and Performance Theory
• Wagner
• Reception Theory
• Music and Gender

Invited talks

• ‘The “performative turn” in opera scholarship: limitations and possibilities’. Research Colloquium, Department of Music, King’s College London, March 2012.
• ‘Unsettling the idea of opera: new media and new scholarship’. Research Seminar, School of Music, Bangor University, November 2011.
• ‘What’s in a Name? Opera Beyond Boundaries’. Research Seminar, Department of Music, University of Southampton, December 2010.
• ‘What’s in a Name? Opera Beyond Boundaries’. Research Seminar, Department of Music, University College Dublin, October 2010.

Selected papers

• Performance Studies International #18: ‘New Voices, Sustainable Futures: Music and Theatre in the 21st Century’ (University of Leeds, 2012)

• Royal Musical Association Annual Conference: ‘But is it opera? Opera scholarship beyond the opera house’ (Wales Millennium Centre, 2012)
• The Theory, Practice and Business of Opera Today: ‘Opera at the Cinema’ (University of Leeds, 2012)
• Royal Musical Association Annual Conference: ‘Technologized Memory, Circumscribed Experience: Opera and its Wagnerian Ghosts’ (University of Sussex, 2011)
• Performance Studies International #17: ‘Technologized Memory, Circumscribed Experience: Opera and its Wagnerian Ghosts’ (Utrecht University, 2011)
• International Workshop on Opera and Video: ‘The opera director’s voice: DVD “extras” and the question of authority’ (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, 2010)
• Royal Musical Association Annual Conference: ‘What can Opera Studies learn from Performance Studies?’ (Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin, 2009)
• Society for Musicology in Ireland Annual Conference: ‘Opera production in Ireland: no place for politics?’ (Waterford Institute of Technology, 2008)

Grants

• Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship (2006–2008), Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences
• PhD research awards: Arts and Humanities Research Board, University of London Academic Trust Funds Committee, German Academic Exchange Service

Publications

Selected publications

• With Craig Vear: guest editor of Digital Opera: New Means and New Meanings, a special issue of International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 8:1 (Spring 2012).
• ‘The Opera Director’s Voice: DVD “Extras” and the Question of Authority’, in Opera and Video, ed. Héctor Pérez López (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012).

• Book review of Angst vor der Zerstörung: Der Meister Künste zwischen Archiv und Erneuerung, ed. Robert Sollich, Clemens Risi, Sebastian Reus and Stephan Jöris (Berlin: Verlag Theater der Zeit, 2008), in Opera Quarterly 27:1 (2011), 139-47.

• ‘Opera production in Ireland: no place for politics?’, in Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland 5 (2009–2010), 31-54.
  http://www.music.ucc.ie/jsmi/index.php/jsmi/article/view/66
• With Joshua Edelman: ‘Internationalization and the Irish State’s Relationship with Theatre and Opera’, in Global Changes, Local Stages: How Theatre Functions in Smaller European Countries, ed. J.J. van Maanen, Andreas Kotte and Anneli Saro (Amsterdam: Rodopi/International Federation for Theatre Research, 2009), 146-75.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Alternative Perspectives: Interdisciplinary Ideas About Performance
• Music and Gender
• Staging Opera: History and Practice
• Weimar Music Theatre

Postgraduate

• Critical Studies