Elsa De Luca

Elsa De Luca is an Assistant Professor of Early Music at NOVA University Lisbon and is deeply involved in the development of tools for computer-assisted research in early music, particularly databases and the automatic encoding of plainchant. She leads the interdisciplinary research project Echoes from the Past: Unveiling a Lost Soundscape with Digital Analysis (2022.01957.PTDC) and has published extensively on musical notation, cryptography, and liturgy in Iberian and French manuscripts.

De Luca has co-edited two special issues—one for Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (TISMIR, in progress) and another for the Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies. She has also co-edited the Music Encoding Conference 2020 Proceedings, the Digital Libraries for Musicology 2025 Proceedings, as well as two volumes entitled The Materiality of Sound in Chant Manuscripts in the West (2023) and The Materiality of Sound in Chant Manuscripts in the East (2025).

She is Executive Secretary of the Centre for Music Studies (CESEM) at NOVA University Lisbon, coordinates the Portuguese Early Music Database, co-directs the book series Musicalia Antiquitatis & Medii Aevi (Brepols), and serves as Treasurer of the Portuguese Society for Research in Music (SPIM). In 2023 she was invited to join the CESEM-FCSH editorial committee and the review editors for the Portuguese Journal of Musicology new series. Over the years, Elsa has collaborated in ten research projects in Italy, France, Portugal, the UK and Canada.