Huub van der Linden

University College Roosevelt - Middelburg

Oratorio, oratory, and the early modern Italian soundscape

2013-2014

Huub van der Linden is a cultural historian. He holds MA degrees in musicology from the University of Utrecht and in Early Modern Cultural and Intellectual History from the Warburg Institute in London (the latter with distinction). In September 2012 he received his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence for his dissertation on the circulation and performance of Italian oratorio around 1700. He is currently attached to University College Roosevelt in Middelburg (The Netherlands). Besides his work on Italian musical culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Van der Linden also has an interest in the history of the book and of reading, as well as in the processes of creating, copying, transporting, and otherwise physically handling paintings in early modern Europe. He has published a number of articles dealing with various aspects of all of these topics. Most recently he has started to explore early modern European perceptions and accounts of the sonic world of Safavid Persia (1501-1736). At the Italian Academy he will work on a project that developed out of his doctoral dissertation, and which deals with the cultural politics of voice in Italy, specifically in relation to a series of oratorio performances in private palace in Bologna in the years around 1700. So far Van der Linden's work has been supported by received numerous study and research grants, among others an eight-month scholarship from the Collegio dei Fiamminghi in Bologna for work on his first MA thesis, fellowships from the Dutch Institute for Art History in Florence and the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome (Hugenholtz Stipend, awarded for an outstanding MA dissertation), a dissertation research fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas Austin, an Ernst Mach Grant from the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education & Research, and a fellowship from the Fondazione Ermitage Italia at Ferrara. Most recently he has worked in Germany thanks to fellowships from the Forschungsbibliothek in Gotha and the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung in Berlin.