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Project Team

Berta Joncus is a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London and a Research Associate of the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford. A historical musicologist, she specializes in the music and practices of the Georgian London stage, European popular music before 1750 and eighteenth-century vocal music. As part of her research, she traces how a performer's star persona, once formed in the public sphere, may come to co-author his or her music. While drawing on perspectives from theatre and cinema studies, she also relies on the methodologies of anthropology, linguistics and popular music to grasp the meaning and genesis of the repertories she studies.

She has published articles in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Eighteenth-Century Music, The Cambridge History to Eighteenth-Century Music, and has co-edited, with Melania Bucciarelli, Music as Social and Cultural Practice: Essays in Honour of Reinhard Strohm (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). Dr. Joncus is currently preparing a monograph titled Kitty Clive, Goddess of Mirth: Creating a Star through Song (1728 -1765) to be published by Boydell & Brewer. In January 2008 she co-organized, together with Jeremy Barlow, the first interdisciplinary conference on the eighteenth-century London stage – ‘John Rich and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage: Commerce Magic and Management’ – and is editing the volume based on its findings, ‘The Stage’s Glory’: John Rich (1692-1761) (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011).

For further details, please visit For further details, please visit Goldsmiths and John Rich.

Michael Burden is Reader in Music at Oxford University, and is Fellow in Music in Opera Studies at New College, Oxford, where he is also Dean. His published research is on the stage music of Henry Purcell, and aspects of dance and theatre in London theatre in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries; it includes an analytical catalogue of Metastasio’s operas as performed in London. He is currently completing books on the staging of opera in London 1660 to 1860, and on the London years of the soprano Regina Mingotti. He is Vice President of the British Society for 18th-century Studies, and a Visitor to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Vanessa L. Rogers is Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of Music at Wabash College in Indiana, USA. She received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 2007 with a dissertation entitled Writing Plays "in the Sing-Song Way": Henry Fielding's Ballad Operas and Early Musical Theater in Eighteenth-Century London. Her areas of research include eighteenth-century English stage music and theatre orchestras, and she is currently working on a book on music in English stage works, for which she received a Folger Library Fellowship in 2007.

Most recently, Vanessa assisted Berta Joncus and Jeremy Barlow with organising the John Rich 2008 Conference, the first truly interdisciplinary conference on the early eighteenth-century London stage (www.johnrich2008.com), and The Georgian Playhouse and Its Continental Counterparts, 1750-1850, which took place in September at the restored Theatre Royal in Richmond, North Yorkshire, with Iain Mackintosh and the Society for Theatre Research (The Georgian Playhouse).

Thaddeus Lipinski is webmaster for Oxford University Library Services and was involved in the Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads. Thaddeus was a contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of Computing and also lectures on digitisation issues.

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