João Pedro Cachopo

João Pedro Cachopo studied Musicology and Philosophy in Lisbon, Paris, and Berlin, earning a PhD in Philosophy from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in 2011 with a dissertation on Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics. He currently teaches in the Department of Musicology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (NOVA/FCSH) and coordinates the Opera Studies Research Cluster at the Centre for the Study of the Sociology and Aesthetics of Music (CESEM). His work spans the fields of musicology, philosophy, critical theory, and film and media studies with a focus on issues of intermediality, remediation, performance, spectatorship, and criticism. He is broadly interested in the relationship between aesthetics and politics; the interrelations of the arts and media; and in concepts of avant-garde, modernism, and postmodernism.

Cachopo is the author of Verdade e Enigma: Ensaio sobre o pensamento estético de Adorno (Vendaval, 2013), which received the First Book Award from the Portuguese PEN Club in 2014, and co-editor of Rancière and Music (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Estética e Política entre as Artes (Edições 70, 2017), and Pensamento Crítico Contemporâneo (Edições 70, 2014). His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and collective volumes such as The Opera Quarterly, New German Critique, Revue Europe, Revista Portuguesa de Musicologia, Colóquio-Letras, the Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature, and elsewhere. He has translated into Portuguese Georges Didi-Huberman, Jacques Rancière, and Theodor W. Adorno.

He was a visiting scholar at the Universität Potsdam (2008), Université Paris 8 (2009), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2010), University of Durham (2012), and Columbia University in the City of New York (2015). He has also served as an Invited Professor at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (2016). Between 2017 and 2019, he was a Marie SkLodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Chicago. In recent years he has presented at multiple conferences in Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, the USA and the UK.

He is currently completing a monograph titled “The Profanation of Opera: Reinventions in Film and Screen Media” and co-editing (with Jelena Novak) a special issue for The Opera Quarterly dedicated to operas based on films.