Alessandra Jones (MA ’14) received an Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship from the American Musicological Society for the 2019-2020 academic year. The Society grants up to three funded fellowships awarded on the basis of academic merit to allow students to work full-time on completing their dissertations. She will be honored at the meeting of the AMS in Boston at the end of this month.
Alessandra joined the PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley in 2014 after receiving her MA in Music from Hunter. Her dissertation, advised by Mary Ann Smart, is titled “Viral Verdi: Italian Sonic Ecologies, 1848-1861” and examines the power relations enacted through sound, singing, listening, and speaking in the mid-nineteenth-century Italian city. An article titled “Noise and Silence in Rigoletto‘s Venice” is forthcoming in Cambridge Opera Journal.
