Jessica Peritz

Jessica Gabriel Peritz is a cultural historian of music, literature, and philosophy in the long eighteenth century, with a particular focus on representations of bodies and politics in Italian opera. Her first book, The Lyric Myth of Voice: Civilizing Song in Enlightenment Italy (forthcoming fall 2022, U. California Press) traces the origin of Western liberal ideologies of voice back to a network of eighteenth-century musical and literary practices. Drawing on a range of approaches and frameworks—including gender studies, disability studies, anthropology, mythology, literary theory, and historical musicology—the monograph argues that Italian Enlightenment attempts to rebrand song ultimately turned the singing voice into a discursive and practical tool for creating “civilized” political subjects.  

Peritz is currently working on two new book-length projects. The first, provisionally titled Weeping Juba, offers a critical reading of how empire, sentimentality, and racialized difference were represented together—and in often unfamiliar, because “premodern,” ways—in early eighteenth-century opera seria. The second project, under the working title The Queer Musical Temporalities of Vernon Lee, delves into the aesthetic theories, music histories, and ghost stories of castrato-obsessed Victorian author Violet Paget (i.e., Vernon Lee).

Peritz’s work has been published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and the Cambridge Opera Journal. Her research and writing have been supported by the Alvin H. Johnson-American Musicological Society 50 fellowship (2018), two Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation research grants (2016, 2019), and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, where she was the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Modern Italian Studies in 2017–18. In 2018–19, she was a (non-resident) Dissertation Fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon-Council for European Studies at Columbia University, and an Affiliated Fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities at The University of Chicago. Among other awards, Peritz has received the the Indiana University Press Prize from the American Musicological Society Midwest Chapter (2014) and the Paul A. Pisk Prize (2018) from the American Musicological Society.

She received her Ph.D. in music history from The University of Chicago in summer 2019, and joined the Yale Department of Music in fall 2019. She also holds an A.B. in early modern history and literature from Harvard and an M.Mus. in vocal performance from Mannes College The New School for Music.