I am a musicologist and cultural historian and I work as a researcher and teacher at the University of Pisa and the Centro Studi Giacomo Puccini in Lucca.
As a researcher and teacher, I study how people and cultural institutions have used music to shape identity and historical narratives from the nineteenth century to the present, engaging with questions of social difference, racial discrimination, and the representation of otherness. I have explored these topics in multiple contexts, including Italian opera, music in transnational communities, music during the Cold War, African American music, film music, the intellectual history of ethnomusicology, the cultural policy of musical institutions, and popular and electronic music. My writings on these and other subjects have appeared in edited collections and scholarly venues such as Music & Letters, Cambridge Opera Journal, The Opera Quarterly, Notes, Grove Music Online, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, Biblioteca Teatrale, and JSTOR Daily.
My first monograph, Teatro alla Scala e promozione culturale nel lungo Sessantotto Milanese (“La Scala and Cultural Promotion in the Long 1968,” 2015), examines La Scala’s relationship with the Milanese working class. My second book, Comporre musica per film in ambiente digitale (“Composing Film Music in a Digital Environment,” 2025), explores contemporary film music through interviews with leading composers, highlighting how digital technologies are transforming the field. I am currently working on a third book on Verdi’s cultural and political impact in nineteenth-century Italian American communities, a project that received the 2023 “Giuseppe Verdi” International Prize from the Rotary Club of Parma. My research has been supported by the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, the German Historical Institute in Rome, and the Immigration History Research Center Archives at the University of Minnesota.
Alongside my work as a researcher, I have taught in several universities including the University of Pisa, Swarthmore College, the University of Delaware, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Siena. Between 2016 and 2020, I also worked as a part-time archivist at the Kislak Center for Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks to this experience, I developed a strong interest in archives and material culture, and I regularly use a wide array of primary sources in my teaching and research.
I spent my years as a university student between Italy and the United States, and I hold PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (music history, 2021) and the University of Siena (comparative studies, 2014). My dissertation from Penn, “Imagining Italy, Surviving America: Opera, Italian Immigrants, and Identity in Philadelphia, 1870-1924,” was the finalist for the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Award.
Siel Agugliaro 