Recognized as one of the leading scholars in the field of Baroque music, Professor Wendy Heller, is the Scheide Professor of Music at Princeton University.  Heller, who served as the Music Department Chair from 2015-2022 and Director of the Program in Italian Studies from 2005-2022 , is also an affiliate member of the Classics Department and associate faculty in the Department of French and Italian.

Heller has published widely on 17th- and 18th-century opera from interdisciplinary perspectives, with emphasis on gender and sexuality, art history, Italian literature, dance history and the classical tradition.  Author of the award-winning Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley, 2003), Heller is the author of numerous articles on the music of Monteverdi, Strozzi, Cavalli, Purcell, Bach and Handel and has co-edited two collections of essays:  Performing Homer:  The Voyage of Ulysses from Epic to Opera, (Routledge, 2019) and Staging History: Historical Drama in Britain and America, 1780-1860. Two of her recently published essays focus on the female soprano in the early modern period: “Bach and the Soprano Voice” in the  volume “Rethinking Bach” (Oxford University Press, 2021), and “‘Una Lingua Sciolta’: Listening to the Voice of Anna Renzi,” in ,” Claudio Monteverdi’s Venetian Operas: Sources, Performance, Interpretation (Routledge, 2022).  Forthcoming essays include “Terpsichore Unchained”: Renaissance Dance and the English Court Masque, Reimagined for the Twentieth Century,” in The Routledge Companion to Choreomusicology: Dialogues in Music and Dance, edited by Samuel N. Dorf and Helen Minors (Routledge, 2024) and “Costanza e Astuzia: Penelope’s Progress on the Venetian Opera Stage (1640-1725)” for the Brill Modern Companion to Homer.

Heller’s work for students and general readers includes Music in the Baroque and its companion volume Anthology of Music in the Baroque, part of the innovative series Western Music in Context: A Norton History  (W. W. Norton, 2013).

Heller has earned numerous fellowships and prizes from such organizations as the ACLS, the Mellon Foundation, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.  Winner of the Rome Prize in Post-Classical Humanistic Studies, Heller has also been a been a Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, an appointee at the Villa I Tatti Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies (as winner of the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars), a Visiting Fellow at New College, Oxford, and was also the Sylvan C. and Pamela Coleman Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  She spent the 2014-15 academic year as an Old Dominion Fellow with the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been named the Scheide Professor of Music History. In 2023, she was named an Honorary Member of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.

Having trained as a singer at New England Conservatory before receiving her PhD in musicology from Brandeis University, Heller maintains a strong interest in performance, promoting collaborations between scholars and performer. She has served as dramaturg for a number of productions of baroque opera at Princeton, including Monteverdi’s Il ritorno di Ulisse in patria and L’incoronazione di Poppea; Francesco Cavalli’s La Callisto. This past year she produced a concert performance of excerpts from Cavalli’s Cavalli’s Veremonda L’amazzone di Aragona  (1652); her edition of that opera, produced at the 2016 Schwetzingen Festival (for which she served as a consultant) will be published by Bärenreiter in 2024. She recently served as a dramaturg for the critically-acclaimed production of The Comet / Poppea, produced by Anthony Roth Costanzo and directed by Yuval Sharon. She is also completing a edition of Handel’s Admeto for Bärenreiter. Known for her engaging lecture style, Heller has spoken for such organizations as Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center, Boston Early Music Festival, Utrecht Early Music Festival, Portland Art Museum (Oregon), Emmanuel Music, and the Drottningholm Palace Theater in Stockholm, and has also been a study leader for Princeton Journeys. Heller served as a faculty participant in the Peking Opera Immersion program, in collaboration with the Program in East Asian Studies.

Heller has served on numerous editorial boards, including the Journal of Musicology, Cambridge Opera Journal, Journal of Music Pedagogy, Journal for the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music, and Journal of the American Musicological Society. She is currently serves on the Operas of Cavalli (Bärenreiter), the Board of the American Handel Society, and is a member of the Venetian Advisory Board for the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. She served on the Board of Directors of the American Musicological Society and was also elected Vice-President of the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.

Heller’s current projects include the monograph Animating Ovid: Opera and the Metamorphoses of Antiquity in Early Modern Italy  for University of California Press and is coediting Barbara Strozzi: In Context with Beth Glixon for Cambridge University Press.  She is a collaborator in the project Penelope’s Web—The Opera, based at Kings College, London. She lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey with her husband Jack Hill and their cat Max.