Delia Casadei is a scholar, critic, and translator. She was Assistant Professor of Musicology at UC Berkeley from 2017-2023, and is now based in Pisa, Italy, where she works as a freelance music critic, lecturer, and translator. She obtained her PhD in Musicology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 with a thesis entitled The Crowded Voice: Speech, Music and Community in Milan, 1955-1974. Between 2015-17 she was a junior research fellow at the University of Cambridge. In 2021/2022 she was a Humanities Research Fellow at UC Berkeley and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Princeton University. She has published in the Cambridge Opera Journal, the Opera Quarterly, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and her two latest articles were published in Representations, one about a recording of a Milanese riot, and the other about Giambattista Vico and sound theories of history.
Her musical criticism has been featured on the website musicalcriticism.com, the Los Angeles Times and The Conversation. For the past few years, she has been working on laughter as an aural cipher of the twentieth-century’s relationship to the notion of the human, of language, and to ideologies of biological and social reproduction, including sound reproduction.
Her first monograph—Risible: Laughter without Reason and the Reproduction of Sound—came out in February 2024 with the University of California Press.
Delia was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2019 – she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.
The intersection of voice, ideologies of language and intelligibility, recording technology and politics in twentieth century music and sound practices.