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• opera, particularly:
  • voice/singers/singing
  • staging practices
  • touring and mobility
  • critical editing
• 19th-century musical cultures
• global and transnational histories of music
• sound studies
• Italian cultural studies

My research considers histories and technologies of operatic performance across the 19th and early 20th centuries. I’ve published articles on Verdi and Italian nation-building, operatic mobility, vocal celebrity culture, early radio, and interwar staging practices. My first monograph, (University of Chicago Press, 2021) explores how networks of opera production and critical discourse enabled by new transport and communication technologies shaped Italian cultural identities during the late Risorgimento.��

I’m currently working on two major projects. First, a new monograph that, by bridging opera, theatre and performance studies, reassesses early 20th-century Italian (and European) staging practices, foregrounding the creative contributions of historically marginalised figures—such as prompters, set designers/builders and prop makers—in the decades preceding the emergence of modern opera direction. Second, I am preparing a critical edition of Donizetti's Otto mesi in due ore (1827) for Ricordi.��

My interest in sonic and auditory cultures led to the establishment of the ‘Sounding (Out) 19th-Century Italy’ research network (2019-20), funded by a��British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award. I was also a founding member of the Leverhulme network ‘Re-imagining�����ٲ��������Ծ���à: Opera and Musical Culture in Transnational Perspective’ (2016-19), based at UCL and with collaborators at Cambridge, Brown (USA) and Campinas (Brazil).��

I currently serve on the Advisory Board of Durham's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies; I am a fouding member of the Northern OPera Research Network; and I lead Northumbria's university-wide Music Research Group.

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• Between Art and Craft: Operatic Set Design in 1930s Florence, Vella, F. 7 Aug 2025, In: Cambridge Opera Journal
• Before and Besides Werktreue: (Re)inventing Operatic Staging at the 1930s Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Vella, F. 1 Jun 2025, In: Twentieth-Century Music
• Networking Operatic Italy, Vella, F. 29 Nov 2021
• De(Railing) Mobility: Opera, Stasis, and Locomotion on Late-Nineteenth-Century Italian Tracks, Vella, F. 23 Oct 2018, In: Opera Quarterly
• Jenny Lind, Voice, Celebrity, Vella, F. 1 May 2017, In: Music and Letters
• Sounding (Out) Nineteenth-Century Italy, Vella, F. 1 Dec 2025, In: Nineteenth-Century Music Review
• Broadcasting the Italian Voice’s Broadcasting: Opera and Italy on the Air, 1920s-1930s, Vella, F. 8 Aug 2022, In: Journal of Modern Italian Studies
• Tamagno Otherwise: Verdi, ‘Ora e per sempre addio’ (Otello), Otello, Act II, Vella, F. 1 Jul 2016, In: Cambridge Opera Journal
• Milan, Simon Boccanegra and the Late-Nineteenth-Century Operatic Museum, Vella, F. 2016, In: Verdi Perspektiven
• Bridging Divides: Verdi’s Requiem in Post-Unification Italy, Vella, F. 2015, In: Journal of the Royal Musical Association

• Organising a conference, workshop, ...: 7th Transnational Opera Studies Conference (TOSC@Santiago) 2026
• Organising a conference, workshop, ...: Northern Opera Research Network Study Day 2025
• Organising a conference, workshop, ...: BFE/RMA Research Students' Conference 2023
• Editorial work: Ricordi (Publisher) 2022
• Editorial work: Editio Musica (Publisher) 2019