My research focuses on Italian opera, and auditory culture more generally, in the period between national unification and the rise of fascism. I’m interested in exploring a widespread fascination with unmediated sound—a fascination that unsettles conventional boundaries between music and literature, popular and avant-garde art, realism and futurism, positivist social science and “irrational” mass politics. Sound, I argue, allowed artists to bring into focus a whole nexus of concerns about Italian modernization; as such, theories of peripheral modernity and “vernacular” modernism are central to my work. As a post-doctoral fellow I will be completing a short monograph entitled Puccini’s Soundscapes, while also researching a larger project, Italy as Opera: Sound and Geography in the Italian Liberal State.