Gabriela Cruz

Gabriela Cruz is a music historian. Her research interests lie at the intersection of the study of opera, theater, technology, aesthetics, and politics. She came to the University of Michigan in 2012 after teaching at Tufts University, the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and the Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal).

Cruz’s most recent book, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Oxford University Press, 2020), examines the transformation of opera into a modern art of spectacle facilitated by the introduction of gas illumination and the development of novel visual and musical technologies of illusion, such as phantasmagoria and the diorama, in opera theaters beginning in the 1820s. Her essays and review essays on operetta, the theater of Verdi, Wagner, and Meyerbeer, French grand opera, romantic aesthetics, early phonography and Portuguese film have appeared in Cambridge Opera Journal, Nineteenth-Century Music, Opera Quarterly, Current Musicology, Journal of the American Liszt Society, the Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia, and in edited volumes published by Rochester University Press, Peter Lang, and Argus Edition. In addition to her work on opera and technology, Cruz is presently pursuing a project on musical comedy in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, investigating the intersections of theatre, music and politics in modern culture.

Professor Cruz currently serves as Chair of the Musicology Department. She teaches courses on opera, art-song, the history of Western music, the musics of Iberia and Latin America, music and mediality, aesthetics and comedy.

Professor Cruz continues to serve the American Musicological Society and the Sociedade Portuguesa de Investigação em Música in various capacities and collaborates with the Centre for the Study of Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (CESEM) of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.