Rate My Professor Clair Rowden

Professor Clair Rowden serves as Professor of Musicology and Head of Music in the School of Culture & Creative Arts at the University of Glasgow. Her research centers on nineteenth-century France, transnationalism and opera, as well as musical theatre, encompassing critical reception, stage production, dance, iconography, and caricature. Current investigations explore material cultures and their connections to opera, singers, and the construction of femininity and celebrity, with a particular emphasis on singers’ jewellery. Rowden is recognized as a public musicologist dedicated to public engagement and knowledge exchange. She regularly authors programme notes for prestigious institutions including the Opéra-Comique in Paris, Wexford Festival Opera, Welsh National Opera, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Bilbao Opera, Teatro San Carlo in Naples, and the Salzburg Festival.

Key publications include her monograph Opera and Parody in Paris, 1860-1900 (Brepols, 2020) and the co-edited volume Carmen Abroad: Bizet’s Opera on the Global Stage (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which received the 2021 Royal Musical Association outstanding edited collection prize. Forthcoming works feature Opera in Transnational Contexts: Circulating Identities and Cultures, co-edited with Barbara Gentili and Paulo M. Kühl (Routledge, 2026), along with contributions such as the introduction and a chapter on the diva Anne Charton-Demeur. Other notable outputs encompass articles like “Deferent daisies: Caroline Miolan Carvalho, Christine Nilsson and Marguerite, 1869” in Cambridge Opera Journal (2018), “Mapping time and space in a transnational history of Carmen” on www.carmenabroad.org (2020), and “Anne Charton-Demeur: a ‘classical’ diva” in the Berlioz Society Bulletin (2023). Rowden holds Fellowships of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and the Learned Society of Wales (FLSW), the latter awarded in 2024 for expertise in music, opera, musicology, and public engagement.