Mary Ann Smart, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Music, will work during her year as a Townsend Fellow on a book entitled Mimomania: The Gestural Language of 19th-Century Opera. Professor Smart defines “gestural music” as music that “says something already visible,” imitating the movements of characters on stage or using an “identifying theme” to call attention to their entrances. She traces the technique from its origins in French grand opera around 1830 to late works by both Verdi and Wagner in order to challenge the dominant, quasi-linguistic approach to operatic music, to counter the tendency in gender studies to privilege the invisible voice over the present, visible body, and, even perhaps, to “loosen” the dominance of words and music and move toward a discourse that can also “listen to” gesture.