Recognized as one of the leading scholars of baroque music, Professor Wendy Heller, is the Scheide Professor of Music and Director of the Program in Italian Studies at Princeton. Heller, who served as the Music Department Chair from 2015-2022, has published widely on 17th- and 18th-century opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, with emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, Italian literature, dance history and the classical tradition. Author of the award-winning Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice and Music in the Baroque, Heller has published widely on the music of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Handel, and Bach. Her current projects include the monograph Animating Ovid: Opera and the Metamorphoses of Antiquity in Early Modern Italy and volume Barbara Strozzi: In Context (co-edited with Beth Glixon).; her edition of Francesco Cavalli’s Veremonda, l’amazzone di Aragona will be published next year. Heller, who also trained as a professional, maintains strong interests in performance and has been a dramaturg for numerous performances of baroque operas at Princeton. Awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Heller has also won numerous fellowships from such organizations as the Mellon Foundation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies.