Academic Faculty

Education: Ph.D. (music history), University of California, Berkeley; M.A. (music history), McGill University; B.Mus. (composition), University of Manitoba.

Research Interests: 20th-century music and aural culture; modernism; sound and memory/preservation; early music revivals; British music; opera

Heather Wiebe’s research deals mainly with 20th-century opera and theater music, exploring issues of politics and spectacle, community, ritual, voice, gender, and most of all, music’s relationship to the past. All of these themes emerge in her book project, Rituals of Lost Faith: Britten and the Culture of Postwar Reconstruction, which examines music’s role in a British quest for social and cultural renewal after the Second World War. Publications include “Benjamin Britten, the ‘National Faith’, and the Animation of History in 1950s England,” Representations (2006); “‘Now and England’: Britten’s Gloriana and the New Elizabethans,” Cambridge Opera Journal (2005); articles on Verdi in repercussions and Atti del Convegno “Verdi 2001,” and “The Rake’s Progress as Opera Museum,” forthcoming in an issue of The Opera Quarterly that she is also editing, on the theme of obsolescence. She is a member of the editorial board of The Opera Quarterly, has received fellowships from the AMS and UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows (2005-2008).