Larissa Irizarry on Adriana Mater, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Janelle Monáe

Our guest for this episode of the Music at Pitt Podcast is musicology doctoral student Larissa Irizarry. Larissa is receiving significant recognition for her research into 21st-century opera and 1970s rock where she explores depictions of gender-based violence, interracial intimacy, and queer intimacy. She will be a Mellon Fellow in 2020–21 and was recently awarded Pitt’s Don O. Franklin Prize for Musicology for her paper on Kaija Saariaho’s opera Adriana Mater which explores rape-related pregnancy. Her forthcoming article “Queer Intimacy: Vocality in Jesus Christ Superstar” is set for publication this year in the journal Women and Music, and she was set to give papers on how Janelle Monáe’s work has shifted from the technological to the fleshy and how it relates to the rise in white nostalgia and heterosexism.