Diana R. Hallman

Diana R. Hallman, Professor of Musicology at the University of Kentucky, is a cultural musicologist who centers her research in 19th-century French opera, with a particular focus on the social-political currency of French grand opera. Her research interests extend to fin-de-siècle French and American music and culture, including transnational exchanges and performance history. Dr. Hallman teaches courses on 18th- and 19th-century music and frequently offers graduate courses in opera history, the politics of opera, studies of gender and race in music, and cross-cultural intersections in Western and global music. 

Following lectureships at Catholic University, Fordham University, and Baruch College-CUNY, Dr. Hallman joined the UK School of Music faculty in Fall 1995. She received the University Research Professor Award (2016-17) and College of Fine Arts Faculty Award for Research (2016), and presently serves as head of the Musicology & Ethnomusicology Division and coordinator of the University of Kentucky Opera Research Alliance, an association that supports new scholar-performer collaborations and interdisciplinary research dedicated to opera.

She is author of the book Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics of Halévy’s La Juive (Cambridge University Press, 2002; 2007), as well as chapters and articles on the life and works of composer Fromental Halévy in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer: Paris, 1830-1914 (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Le Concours du Prix de Rome de la musique, 1803-1968 (Symétrie, 2011), French Historical Studies (2022), and Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. She is a contributor to the collections Meyerbeer and Grand Opéra from the July Monarchy to the Present (Brepols, 2016), Sephardism: Spanish Jewish History and the Modern Literary Imagination (Stanford University Press, 2012), The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism (Oxford, 2020), and Histoire de l’opéra français (Fayard, 2020) and to program books of international opera houses, including the Opéra National de Paris, Metropolitan Opera, The Royal Opera–Covent Garden, Zürich Opernhaus, De Nederlandse Opera, Göteborgsoperan, and Gran Teatre del Liceu. She has presented papers at meetings of the American Musicological Society, Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, France: Musiques, Cultures, Royal Musical Association, Society for French Historical Studies, Society for American Music, and TOSC.

Currently she is preparing a study of opéra comique in the July Monarchy and has recently edited, with UK alumnus César Leal, America in the French Imaginary: Music, Revolution and Race (Boydell & Brewer, 2022).