Please join us for the distinguished American Musicological Society / NYU lecture given by Professor Emily Wilbourne, who will discuss her book.

The talk is free and open to the public, though registration is required:

https://www.amsmusicology.org/events/2025-ams-nyu-lecture/

The 2025 AMS/NYU Lecture, “Razza, Race, and the Operatic Voice in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” will be held on Thursday, 10 April 2025 at 7:00pm in Room 303 at New York University’s Education Building, 35 West 4th Street, New York, NY 10011. Attendance is free, but registration is required.

In this lecture, Professor Emily Wilbourne draws on her recent award-winning book, Voice, Slavery, and Race in Seventeenth-Century Florence (Oxford, 2023).

The contemporary Italian word razza, meaning race, is often treated as if it had no early modern cognates, and while the word itself was indeed used, the meaning was closer to the English concept of lineage or blood line.  Drawing on a rich record of early modern performance and the archival traces of the racially marked and enslaved inhabitants of Florence, Prof. Wilbourne shows how razza operated to sift and sort people into categorically different types and how the operatic voice relied upon and disseminated such tropes, naturalizing razza as an inherited capacity and limiting opportunities for social mobility.

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