Humanities in the Village ft. Laura Vasilyeva and Shane Butler
Schedule
Mon Apr 13 2026 at 06:30 pm to 08:30 pm
UTC-04:00Location
Bird in Hand Coffee & Books | Baltimore, MD
Celebrating Laura Vasilyeva's new volume OPERA AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT!About this Event
This event was originally scheduled for February 23, but has been moved to Monday, April 13th due to weather.
Presenting the February edition of Humanities in the Village, an event series in partnership with the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University, which aims to make scholarship publicly accessible.
We're thrilled to welcome Laura Vasilyeva in celebration of her new book Opera and the Built Environment, the first book to examine the classic Italian opera house in a global context. With attention to the sensuous dimensions of their auditoria, Vasilyeva reveals the calculated reasons these theaters took on the form they did. The result is a book that reveals unknown associations between the Italian opera house and matters of environmental destruction, empire, and belonging, showing us new and unexpected patterns in how opera connects to the world we know.
Shane Butler, Nancy H. and Robert E. Hall Professor in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, will join Vasilyeva in conversation.
Whether it's your first time at the series or you've been attending for years, we hope you'll join us to usher this exciting new book into the world!
Order OPERA AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT here!
Laura Vasilyeva (Protano-Biggs) is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. Trained as a researcher of nineteenth-century Italian opera, her research has centered to date on themes of opera, environmental catastrophe, and race. She is author of the recent book Opera and the Built Environment (University of Chicago Press, 2025) as well as a several recent articles and book chapters. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and in 2022 was Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge.
Broadly speaking, Shane Butler's work regards the relationship between embodied experience and art, particularly literature. His most recent work regards the intersection of sexuality and aesthetics and includes a monograph that was ten years in the making, The Passions of John Addington Symonds (Oxford University Press, 2022), on the Victorian scholar, poet, and essayist responsible for one of the first major studies of same-sex love in Ancient Greece.
Where is it happening?
Bird in Hand Coffee & Books, 11 East 33rd Street, Baltimore, United StatesUSD 0.00
