Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar: Dr. Naomi André

Opera as a Space of Potential

What happens when opera tells new stories—not of kings and gods, but of people living today and the issues shaping contemporary life? Long associated with a fading past, opera houses are nonetheless being transformed in ways that speak directly to current realities. Alongside canonical works, operas centered on Black and Latino/a lives have long been in conversation with the mainstream tradition, addressing themes such as policing, magical realism, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, and Federico García Lorca. By confronting histories of exclusion, the opera house can become a space of care, repair, and collective healing.

Naomi André is the David G. Frey Distinguished Professor in the Department of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and professor emerita at the University of Michigan in Afroamerican and African Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Residential College.

Professor André's publications include the books Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement and Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera and co-edited collections Blackness in Opera; African Performance Arts and Political Acts; and The Music of Mzilikazi Khumalo: Language, Culture, and Song in South Africa. Actively engaged with performance today, she has worked with opera companies, symphonies, and is a founding member of the Black Opera Research Network (BORN). She was the inaugural Scholar in Residence at the Seattle Opera (2019–2024) and has served on the Boards of the American Musicological Society, the Kurt Weill Foundation, and Detroit Opera.