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What is the point of opera and Opera Studies in the Anthropocene? Neither operas about climate change nor the scholarship that interrogates them will save the planet or the life forms that call it home. Building on the Blue Humanities work of Stacy Alaimo and Melody Jue – and bearing in mind the limits of the New Materialism in which that work originated – I argue for Blue Opera Studies as a means of developing “the imaginaries that seas require” (Alaimo, 2020) from audiences, stage directors, and performers. I propose several strategies for Blue Opera Studies by foregrounding the sea in operas that are not explicitly about climate change, representing a wide variety of musical styles: Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (2000), Dallapiccola’s Ulisse (1968), Soper’s Here Be Sirens (2014), and Davis’s Amistad (1997).

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unibe-ch.zoom.us/j/63140587186

Meeting-ID: 631 4058 7186

Kenncode: 083099