Jessica Peritz

Assistant Professor in the Department of Music

Jessica Gabriel Peritz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Yale University. Her research focuses on musical and intellectual culture in the eighteenth century, with an emphasis on gender, emotion, and voice in Enlightenment Italy. Currently, she explores how Italian anxieties about the operatic voices of women and castrati gave rise to an ideological connection in European culture between voice, feelings, and subjectivity. Her article “Orpheus’s Civilizing Song, or, The Politics of Voice in Late Enlightenment Italy” is forthcoming in Fall 2019 in Cambridge Opera Journal. Her work has been supported by awards and fellowships from the American Musicological Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome, among others. She holds a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard University and an M.Mus. in Vocal Performance from The New School. She received her Ph.D. in Music History from The University of Chicago in June 2019.