Holly Ann Lawson

Holly is a PhD candidate at Jesus College Cambridge, where she holds the title of Hogwood Scholar. Having completed her MPhil thesis on musical revivals of Greek tragedy in Germany and England in the 1840s, Holly specialises in the cultural history of nineteenth-century vocal music and reception histories of the theatre, broadly defined across a variety of genres ranging from opera, tragedy, and melodrama. The primary focus of her doctoral research offers a case study into the life of the German contralto, actress, author, and impresaria Anna Marie Stegemann, known to nineteenth-century audiences as Felicita Vestvali. This project brings her interest in the musical afterlives of classical antiquity into dialogue with global opera studies and Shakespearean performance studies to explore shifting theories of vocality in nineteenth-century German and Italian imaginations, and how these ideas were enacted across transatlantic operatic circuits.

Holly has presented her research at both Musicology and Classics conferences at the University of Cambridge and the University of St Andrews, as well as to international societies devoted to women in music and the study of Richard Wagner.

Holly received her MPhil in Music (Distinction) from Magdalene College Cambridge in 2024, which was fully funded by the Cambridge Trust and a Baillie Gifford Masters Studentship. Prior to this, she studied for her BA in Music at the University of York, graduating with First Class Honours.

Holly’s PhD is supervised by Professor Benjamin Walton, and is co-funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP and Jesus College.