Daniela Graca

Daniela Graca is a historian of gender and music studying for a PhD in Music at the University of Cambridge. She holds a Master of Arts in Musicology from McGill University and a Bachelor of Music in Musicology from the University of Ottawa. Her doctoral thesis explores constructions of gender and the body in the musical cultures of women’s Catholic communities in early sixteenth-century Florence, focused on laude (vernacular spiritual songs) written within a network of Dominican women’s institutions devoted to Saint Catherine of Siena and associated with living mystics.

Through archival research Daniela uncovers women’s theological texts, writings about music, networks of correspondence, and lauda texts which provide insight into musical embodiment and diverse conceptualisations of femininity. She uses music as a lens through which to examine how Dominican sisters reappropriated popular ideas that linked femininity with the flesh and bodily vice by placing the body—often at its most unruly and “feminine”—centrally within their experiences of and writings about spirituality. Her research ultimately explores the intersections between the equally embodied performance of gender and performance of music.

In addition to the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership, Daniela’s work is supported by a Doctoral Fellowship with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her OOC-AHRC-DTP is co-funded by Girton College.