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Dr. Christy Thomas Adams is an Associate Professor of Musicology at The University of Alabama and previously held faculty positions at the Yale School of Music, Bowdoin College, and Bates College. She received her PhD with distinction in Music History from Yale University. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, she also holds undergraduate degrees in Music, Art History, and History. Dr. Adams’s broad research interests include the history and theory of opera, reception studies, cultural history, the history of media technologies, and the theoretical and conceptual issues of performance and mediation. Her current book project, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, is entitled Operatic Encounters with New Media: Sound Recording and Silent Cinema in Italy; in it, she explores the ways in which new media technologies from the turn of the twentieth century appropriated nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian operatic repertoire and, in turn, impacted operatic creation and circulation. Specifically, she considers the evolving responses of the Italian opera industry to the emerging cinematic medium in the early decades of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on Casa Ricordi, the foremost Italian music publisher of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Dr. Adams’s publications include articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Opera Quarterly, and Music in the Moving Image, as well as chapters in Puccini in Context and Verdi in Context (forthcoming), both with Cambridge University Press. Dr. Adams has presented at both national and international conferences, including the American Musicological Society, the Transnational Opera Studies Conference, Music and the Moving Image, and the American Association for Italian Studies. Under the auspices of Bertelsmann and the Archivio Storico Ricordi, she also co-curated an international touring exhibition to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Giacomo Puccini’s death. She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Opera Journal, a publication of the National Opera Association aimed at a broad and diverse readership of opera scholars and practitioners and dedicated to fostering opera scholarship that bridges the worlds of performance and musicology.

As an educator, Dr. Adams is committed to inclusive education and to using Western art music as a subject through which to train critical skills for the twenty-first century: critical thinking and listening, written and oral communication, creativity, and collaboration. As a music historian with a background in both art history and history, she encourages her students to engage with the historical and cultural contexts in which repertoire was created as well as to understand how historical compositions, though received differently, are still relevant today. She has experience teaching a diverse body of students, both majors and non-majors, in a wide range of graduate and undergraduate music history courses, as well as music appreciation and music theory courses.

Aside from her research and teaching, Dr. Adams also maintains an active presence as a performer. A classically trained singer, she has performed in a variety of venues as both a soprano soloist and a choral member, including with the Alabama Symphony Orchestra Chorus, UA Opera Guild, National Concerts, Opera Maine, ChoralArt Masterworks, Colby College, Oratorio Chorale, Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church, and Battell Chapel, and also worked as a supernumerary for the late Baltimore Opera Company.