Kristen Clough

Kristen Clough received her Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Michigan in 2020 and a BA in Music Education summa cum laude from Providence College with a concentration in voice in 2010. She joined the University of Arizona faculty in 2022. Her dissertation work “Opera in Crisis? Revealing the Cultural and Political Impact of French Fourth Republic Opera, 1945-1958” was supported by a Lurcy Trust fellowship and guided by Dr. Jane F. Fulcher. Her dissertation won the University of Michigan Louise Cuyler Prize in Musicology for best dissertation chapter. She also worked as Director of Outreach and Education at the Gershwin Initiative in Ann Arbor where she guided undergraduate research and media publications. She currently serves as an Executive Editor for the National Opera Association's scholarly publication The Opera Journal. 

Her research engages with an interdisciplinary approach to opera studies, drawing together techniques of inquiry from a variety of disciplines including cultural histories, political studies, colonial studies, and works on gender and identity. Her book project questions the assumption that opera in the post-war of France was stagnant, and instead paints a dynamic picture of the operatic field—and its political power—both in Paris and in the oft neglected French provinces and radiophonic spaces. She has presented her work on Milhaud’s unpublished opera Bolivar as the 2024 scholarly paper competition winner at the National Opera Association conference in Tempe, AZ and at the Princeton University conference “Within and Without Les Six at 100” in 2020. She has been a visiting scholar for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and a panelist for the Gershwin Critical Edition. She published an opera guide for the Michigan Opera Theatre on Ricky Ian Gordon’s 27.

At the University of Arizona she teaches courses focused on Opera and American Popular Musics. In her free time she enjoys crafting in the fiber arts and indulging her fascination with science-fiction television and its musics.

Selected Publications:

"Liberating the Opéra: Cultural Politics, Subversion, and Milhaud’s 'Failed' Bolivar,”  The Opera Journal 57, no.1 (Spring/Summer 2024): 26–48.

“Between Gertrude and Alice: Self-Definition at 27 Rue de Fleurus,” for the Michigan Opera Theatre study guide for Ricky Ian Gordon’s 27, 2018.

“Faith and Obsession; Poulenc’s Explorations of Self in the Autobiographical Roles of Blanche (Les Dialogues des Carmélites) and Elle (La Voix humaine),” The Musicology Review, Dublin, 2013.