Our Faculty

Background

Andrew Walkling's research and teaching interests focus on early modern Britain, with an emphasis on the English court and courtly cultural production in the late seventeenth century, and are situated within and among several disciplines, including history, visual and material culture, literary studies, performance studies and musicology. In particular, he is an expert on seventeenth-century English musical theatre and on the composer Henry Purcell.

His work explores early modern cultural materials from an interdisciplinary perspective, seeking to rethink the configurations and interrelationships of conventionally separate genres—visual, dramatic, literary, musical—and to understand them as part of a wider "textuality" deployed in the construction and dissemination of seventeenth-century absolutism.

Selected Publications

• Masque and Opera in England, 1656–1688 (Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera Series; Routledge, 2017)
• English Dramatick Opera, 1661–1706 (Ashgate Interdisciplinary Studies in Opera Series; Routledge, 2019)
• Matthew Locke and Christopher Gibbons, Cupid and Death (co-edited with Robert Thompson), “Musica Britannica” series (London: Stainer and Bell for the Royal Musical Association, forthcoming)
• articles on Restoration drama, music publication, court studies, and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas

Education

• MA, PhD, Cornell University
  
• BA, Dartmouth

Research Interests

• Seventeenth-Century British History
• Visual Culture
• Literary Studies
• Performance Studies
• Musicology

Clinical Interests

• Early music performance practice

Teaching Interests

• Early Modern London: Architecture, Sound and Space
• Music and Text in 17th-Century England
• The Masque in 17th-Century England
• British Painting from Holbein to Hogarth
• Courses in English literature: The English Civil War; Restoration; Augustanism
• Graduate seminars on British art, architecture, and print culture; 17th-century English literature; early modern theatre history and dramatic theory

Awards

• Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service, 2023–2024
• Research fellowships from Yale Center for British Art (2011), Folger Shakespeare Library (2011 and 2017), William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (2011 and 2017), Huntington Library (2016), Harry Ransom Center (2017), and Houghton Library, Harvard University (2017)
• Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2010–2011
• University's Outstanding Graduate Director Award, 2008–2009