Harris S. Saunders, Jr. joined the faculty of the School of Theatre and Music as Associate Professor of Music in January 1998. He came to UIC after serving at UCLA. Born and raised and in New York, he did both his undergraduate and graduate work at Harvard: B.A. in German and Music (1975), M.A. (1979) and Ph.D. in Music (1985). He has a broad knowledge of the history of opera from its beginnings through today, and his special area is Venetian opera of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He has completed a critical edition of Alessandro Scarlatti’s Pirro e Demetrio (1694) and is currently completing a monograph entitled The Persistence of Glory: Venetian Opera in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries. He has contributed numerous articles on Baroque opera to The New Grove Dictionary of Opera (1992), several of which will be incorporated into the upcoming new edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Professor Saunders has spent significant time abroad, first as a Fulbright scholar in Munich (1975–1976) and, since the 1980’s, several sojourns for research purposes in Italy. Fluent in French, German, and Italian, he has translated a number of essays, his longest being his translation of Nino Pirrotta’s monograph Don Giovanni Progress: A Rake Goes to the Opera.
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