Donato SommaDonato Somma is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand. Teaching and supervising in Music, he also engages with interdisciplinary teaching across artistic disciplines with the broader Wits School of Arts and humanities. Opera, as inherently interdisciplinary, is both model and subject for reading cultural history from multiple critical perspectives. His research interests include the presence of opera in Africa against the radically shifting political and social backdrops of the past two centuries. From colonial contexts through the rise and fall of apartheid, and successive post-apartheid moments, producing and singing opera has been used to signify a range of positions. His work has investigated these positions in the contexts of Italian prisoner-of-war camps in South Africa, and black opera in the twenty-first century. His work on Italian POWs in South Africa has extended to the presence of these prisoners in the South African imagination across the fields of fiction, memorialization and folklore. His current work offers a reading of the driving forces behind the building of opera houses in Egypt and South Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Read More Read Less