Dr. Jane Sylvester’s work centers on studies of embodiment, material histories, gender, and scientific cultures within Italian opera from the nineteenth century to the present. Jane’s current book project, entitled Verismo’s Bodies: Opera, Science, and the Italian Post-Unification Era is under contract with University of California Press with an expected publication date of spring 2027. Jane has published numerous articles and chapters related to this area of her work, including “Dramatised Deviancy: ‘Tosca’ at the Dawn of Criminal Anthropology” (Cambridge Opera Journal, 2022), “Puccini’s Material Girls: Tensions of the Spiritual Body in ‘Le Villi’” (Opera Quarterly, 2024), and “Puccini’s Italian Critics” (in Puccini in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2023), as well as a forthcoming book chapter in Puccini 24: Centro Studi Giacomo Puccini.
Her most recent research explores contemporary operatic revivals through performance collaboration with haute couture fashioners in various theaters throughout Europe. She has a forthcoming book chapter related to this project entitled “Callas on the Catwalk: Operatic Revival in the House of Valentino” which will be published in Embodied Musicology: Ways that Embodiment Shapes Performance and Reception with Brepols Press (November 2025).
Her work has been supported by external fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Musicological Society, and the Presser Foundation, among others. Her ongoing research throughout Italy has also been supported by UMKC’s Faculty Funding for Excellence Award and an Early Career Faculty Award from the UMKC Emeritus College. Jane was also awarded the UMKC Friends of the Conservatory Faculty Excellence Award in 2024 for creating and directing Sight X Sound, an interdisciplinary performance series with creative arts institutions throughout Kansas City.
Committed to engaging with both public and academic audiences, Jane has collaborated numerous times with the Lyric Opera of Kansas City as a Pre-Opera Talk Artist as well as a lecturer for their Opera Dives Deep series. She has also collaborated with Detroit Opera, Toledo Opera, and with the Amics del Liceu (Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona) to contribute multimedia articles, program notes, and podcast episodes. She has presented her research nationally and internationally at numerous meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Transnational Opera Studies Conference, and the North American and International Conferences on Nineteenth-Century Music.
At the Conservatory, Jane has taught both semesters of the undergraduate music history survey, the graduate Research and Bibliography in Music course, and has designed graduate courses on the History of Opera, Music of the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic Eras, and Music and the Supernatural. She completed her Master’s and Ph.D. in Musicology at the Eastman School of Music in 2021, and also holds Bachelor’s degrees in Music Education and Saxophone Performance from Michigan State University.
