Valeria De Lucca is a musicologist who specializes in early modern music and society, and the visual aspects of the operatic spectacle. After completing her PhD at Princeton University she held postdoctoral fellowships at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge and at the University of Southampton, where she will be a lecturer in music from September 2012. Her work explores the role that music, and opera in particular, played in the aristocracy’s cultural programs in early modern Italy. An important part of De Lucca’s work examines the function of theatrical costumes as bearers of multiple socio-political, aesthetic and cultural meanings. De Lucca is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, including “Dressed to Impress: The Costumes of Cesti’s Orontea (Rome, 1661)” (Early Music, forthcoming) and she is the co-editor of “Fashioning Opera and Musical Theatre: Stage Costumes in Europe from the Late Renaissance to 1900” (in progress).