Faculty of Music - Events

Making Gender in Opera: East Meets West
12–13 December 2025 | Faculty of Music, University of Oxford | Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities

This international conference explores gender, performance, and theatricality through a comparative lens on opera and theatre traditions across the world. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, this conference examines how gender is constructed, embodied, and represented on the operatic stage, from early European opera to contemporary Asian theatre forms.

Hosted at the Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford, the two-day event features research papers and roundtable discussions engaging with themes of performance, identity, and cross-cultural exchange. Topics include cross-gender performance, voice and embodiment, opera anthropology, global theatrical aesthetics, and the politics of representation. It aims to foster dialogue between musicology, ethnomusicology, gender studies, and theatre research, offering an inclusive platform for interdisciplinary exchange.

Open to scholars, students, artists, and the general public, "Making Gender in Opera: East Meets West" invites audiences to experience opera as a global and evolving art form that bridges cultural traditions and redefines understandings of gender and performance.

For abstract submission, please contact genderopera@outlook.com