Philip Gossett

Philip Gossett is the Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Music. He studies the history of nineteenth-century Italian opera, sketch studies, aesthetics, textual criticism, and performance practice. He serves as general editor of The Works of Giuseppe Verdi (to be published by the University of Chicago and Casa Ricordi of Milan in 2015) and of The Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter-Verlag). His book Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera (Chicago, 2006) won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society. Gossett is the first musicologist to win the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award and has been awarded Italy’s highest civilian honor, the Cavaliere di Gran Croce. He is also the former president of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Textual Scholarship. He serves as lecturer and consultant to opera houses across America and Italy, and this past summer advised the production team at the Santa Fe Music Festival in the performance of Maometto Secondo. A former dean of the Humanities Division, Gossett has been at the University of Chicago since 1968.