Jelena Novak

Jelena Novak

Nota Biográfica:

Jelena Novak is a researcher at CESEM (Center for Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music), FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. Her fields of interests are modern and contemporary music, recent opera and musical theatre, music and new media, capitalist realism, voice studies in the age of posthuman and feminine identities in music. Exploring those fields, she works as a researcher, lecturer, writer, dramaturge, music critic, editor and curator focused on bringing together critical theory and contemporary art. She has been a founding committee member of the Society for Minimalist Music and a founding member of the editorial collective TkH [Walking Theory]. In 2013 she won the Thurnau Award for Music-Theatre Studies from the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her most recent books are Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body (Routledge, 2015), Operofilia (Orion Art, 2018) and Einstein on the Beach: Opera beyond Drama (co-edited with John Richardson, Routledge, 2019). She is currently co-editing (with Joao Pedro Cachopo) a special issue for The Opera Quarterly dedicated to operas based on films and preparing co-edited volume (with Kris Dittel) “Singing beyond Human”.

Novak studied musicology, art theory, theory of media and cultural analysis in Serbia (University of Arts, Belgrade), Norway (Norges musikkhøgskole, Oslo) and in the Netherlands (ASCA, University of Amsterdam and Koninklijk Conservatorium Den Haag). Her work appears in international peer-reviewed journals and collective volumes such as The Opera Quarterly, Studies in Musical Theatre, Music, Sound and the Moving Image, Dramaturgias, Teatron, TkH Journal, International Journal of Music New Sound, Journal Muzikologija, Zizek and Music (forthcoming), Das Wohnzimmer als Loge (2016), Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013) etc. She presented her work in Europe, Asia, North and South America and her texts are published in English, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Croatian, Serbian, Dutch and Swedish and were commissioned by BBC, UNESCO and De Nationale Opera&Ballet (Amsterdam) among others. Her latest achievement as a dramaturge is: LIMBO, an Opera (Tel Aviv, 2019) and that same year she co-curated (with K. Dittel) the exhibition “Post-Opera” at TENT, Rotterdam.