Dr Berta Joncus

Career summary

Born in Toronto, Berta studied and worked in Vienna as a singer, and completed her Master’s degree at Bonn University. After working as an editor at the New Grove Dictionary of Music, she completed her DPhil at Oxford University in 2004. That year she was awarded a three-year British Academy postdoctoral Fellowship hosted by St Catherine’s College, Oxford; in 2007 was appointed stipendiary lecturer in music at St Anne’s College and St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

Her research focuses on the music and iconography of the eighteenth-century London stage, and the relations between representations of singers in print and music.

She reviews CDs for the BBC Music Magazine and for BBC Radio 3.

She was academic adviser for the exhibition at the Handel House Museum, ‘Handel and the Divas’, 30 April-16 Nov 2008.

Areas of interest / research

Music, iconography, print culture.

Details of books/publications relating to your work on British portraiture

‘”His Spirit is in Action Seen”: Milton, Mrs. Clive and the Simulacra of the Pastoral in Comus’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 2/1 (2005), 7–40.

‘One God, so many Farinellis: Mythologizing the Star Castrato’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28/3 (2005), 437–96.

Kitty Clive, Goddess of Mirth: Creating a Star through Song (1728–1765) (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming).