Dr Sophie Horrocks David

Profile

I joined the University of Leeds in November 2025 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. My funded project, Beyond Bernhardt: women performer-directors in Francophone theatres, 1790-1918 sits at the intersection between musicology, theatre studies, and French history. It rehabilitates forgotten female agency in the dual artistic-managerial practices of the long nineteenth-century. My mentor for the project is Professor Barbara Kelly.

I received my PhD from Durham University in early 2024, researching the socio-political function of touring opera and theatre companies in regional France (1824-64). This was funded by AHRC Northern Bridge (2019-2023) under the supervision of Dr Katherine Hambridge and Professor Thomas Wynn. Prior to this, I completed a Masters of Musicology at King's College London in 2015 and an undergraduate degree in Music at the University of Cambridge in 2014.

Besides my work in academia, I have an ongoing commitment to supporting access to music for a wide public, including extensive experience of managing projects in music learning and participation. Prior to starting my doctoral studies, I worked in the education teams of English National Opera, the Royal Opera House, and Live Music Now. This experience has allowed me to work on several impact activities during my PhD: I workied as Associate Editor with the education team at The Metropolitan Opera to produce learning resources, collaborated with Northern Opera on a digital exhibition, and created a podcast with Opera Offstage discussing the place of outreach in today’s opera industry. Between submitting my PhD and starting at Leeds, I worked as Artistic Development Manager at the National Centre for Early Music in York, and I remain involved in co-supervising a doctoral project exploring contemporary audiences’ relationship with early music through practice-based research around nineteenth-century string performance techniques.

I am also a singer (mezzo soprano) and have performed with Opéra de Dijon and l’Opéra National du Capitol, Toulouse.

Research interests

My research centres on French musical culture of the long nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the musical stage, its practices, performers, and politics across genres from grand opéra to vaudeville and the café concert.

I am especially interested in exploring the musical environment of the French regions and its relationship with the centre, the development of concepts of ‘high-art’ and popular forms of theatre, and the influence on musical life of performers and cultural intermediaries such as administrators, theatre personnel, the press, and publishers. More broadly, my work often involves thinking about the relationship between music and French politics, processes of repertoire circulation and adaptation, and, more recently, the place of women in French music making. I am also developing performance practice as a method to inform my historical research, inspired by recent collaborations in workshopping vaudeville vocality and text-music relations (Being Human 2024).

I have published journal articles on the Auber’s La Muette and the circulation and adaptation of grand opéra (Cambridge Opera Journal) and the aesthetics underpinning the French government’s national infrastructure for provincial theatre (French History). I have also contributed book chapters in edited collections on the formation of regional communities through itinerant theatre and the place of Rossini, Schubert and transnational music-making in spa town identity. I am currently working on a book project drawn from my PhD provisionally entitled Travelling theatre troupes and the French political imaginary, 1824-1864 that uncovers the artistic work and socio-political function of touring opera and theatre companies in the regions.

In my current Leverhulme project, I shift my attention to the work of women as theatre directors across Francophone geographies (Paris, province, empire and colonies) during the long nineteenth century. The project reveals women’s power to shape cultural institutions and advance musical practices in different stage contexts and across shifting political regimes, from Mlle Raucourt to Delphine Ugalde and Gabrielle Réjane. Recovering the place of the female theatre manager within French society and the moral and legal restrictions it placed upon women also offers new understandings of nineteenth-century conceptions of female behaviour.

In previous institutions, I have taught undergraduate seminars and lectures for the specialised courses ‘Opera Studies’ and ‘Music and Politics in the French Revolution’, and contributed to musicology survey courses on the 18^th and 19^th centuries. I have also worked as mentor for The Brilliant Club, supporting state-school students transition to university.

Qualifications

• PhD, Durham University, 2024
• MMus, King's College London, 2015
• BA(Hons), University of Cambridge, 2014

Professional memberships

• Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
• Royal Musical Association