Laurie Stras

Laurie Stras is a musicologist and musician, whose research interests range from the 16th century to modern popular music. She is professor emerita of the University of Southampton^[1] and has been a research professor at the University of Huddersfield.^[2]

Stras studied harpsichord, piano and singing at the Royal College of Music, London, and has a doctorate from Royal Holloway and Bedford New College where her thesis was on the madrigals of Marc'Antonio Ingegneri.^[1] She worked as a freelance singer and keyboard performer, and for four years was musical director of the Royal National Theatre.^[1] In 2018 she took up a three-year post of research professor at the University of Huddersfield.^[2]

Her research interests include early music, popular music and music in disability studies. Her publications include books on women's music in 16th-century Ferrara, Italy, and on "whiteness, femininity, adolescence and class in 1960s music", and she has published chapters or journal articles on a wide range of subjects including assistive technology in music, Connee Boswell (wheelchair-using jazz singer), Monteverdi, and eroticism in music, and revised the entry on Marc'Antonio Ingegneri in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.^[3] In 2023-2024 she was supported by an Emeritus Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust to work on The Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript and Suor Maria Celeste Galilei at San Matteo in Arcetri, to be published by Cambridge University Press in its "Elements" series.^[4]

She is director of the women's vocal ensemble Musica Secreta, having been co-director with its founder Deborah Roberts until Roberts' death in 2024.^[5][6] Stras's work with the associated amateur and semi-professional choir Celestial Sirens gained her the "Individually-led project" award in the 2014 Engage Competition of the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE).^[7][8] Stras's research informs the ensemble's repertoire and performances, and she leads workshops such as "Music and Ritual in a 16th-century convent".^[9]

She received the American Musicological Society's 2019 Otto Kilkenny Award (given for "a musicological book of exceptional merit published by a scholar who is past the early stages of their career")^[10] for her 2018 work Women and Music in 16th Century Ferrara.^[11]

In 2017-2018 she served as president of the University of Southampton branch of the University and College Union.^[1]

Stras was one of the authors, all of whom "have experienced prolonged covid-19 symptoms, and have participated in various kinds of Long Covid advocacy", of an October 2020 opinion piece in The BMJ on the importance of using the "patient made" term Long Covid.^[12]

Selected publications

• Stras, Laurie (2018). Women and Music in Sixteenth-Century Ferrara. Cambridge UP. ISBN 9781108815482.^[13][14]
• Stras, Laurie, ed. (2016). She's So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music. London: Routledge. ISBN 9781315087986.^[15][16]
• Blackburn, Bonnie J.; Stras, Laurie, eds. (2016). Eroticism in early modern music. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9781472443335.^[17][18]
• Stras, Laurie (2016). "Subhuman or Superhuman?: (Musical) Assistive Technology, Performance Enhancement, and the Aesthetic/Moral Debate". In Howe, Blake (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies. pp. 176–190. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199331444.013.19.
• Ledbetter, Steven; Stras, Laurie (2001). "Ingegneri ..., Marc'Antonio". In Sadie, Stanley; Tyrrell, John (eds.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed.). London: Macmillan. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.13795.