Danielle Simon

Danielle Simon is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and studies the intersection of musical performance and emerging media technologies in Italy during and after the fascist period. Her current book project, titled Fascism On Air, explores how music broadcast on the radio generated and mediated political relationships within Italy and abroad during the first three decades of Italian radio broadcasting. Her research has been supported by the Dartmouth Society of Fellows, the Mabel McCloud Lewis Foundation, and the American Musicological Society. Her research and teaching interests include histories and theories of music and media, music and politics, and opera and musical theater. 

Her writing has appeared in English and Italian in publications including the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, the Opera Quarterly and Representations, and is forthcoming in Laboratoire italien, The Cambridge Companion to Music and Fascism, The Cambridge History of Italian Opera, and the edited volume Sonic Circulations, 1900-1950. She is an organizer of the transnational and interdisciplinary research group “Everyday Fascisms,” which was awarded a British Academy Rising Stars Engagement Award in 2022, and a member of the Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth, for which she is spearheading the development of an Italian lexicon for digital humanities tools that facilitate collaborative research and teaching on historical media archives. She has presented research at international conferences across Europe and North America and has been an invited participant in panels on Italian futurism and the arts, music and film, and 19^th-century Italian music cultures. 

A trained singer, in 2017 she directed the modern world premiere of the first Italian radio opera, Il Cuore di Wanda, in collaboration with American artist E.V. Day.